I think this Luigi dude shouldn’t have been charged with terrorism under New York law, but I can also recognize that Dylann Roof also shouldn’t have been charged with terrorism under New York law for killing people in South Carolina.

Roof was literally sentenced to the death penalty for federal hate crime killings, so I’m not sure there was more the prosecutors should have done. And I’m categorically against the death penalty, even for people like Roof, but this is a terrible example of a double standard.

BOP? He’s not a federal prisoner, why would the federal BOP be involved in anything?

They’re killing the middle class though

Some schools might be, but not places like Chicago or Harvard. At least not through their tuition policies. They give financial aid to those up to a pretty high income threshold.

UChicago, for example, gives free tuition to anyone who is the first in their family to attend college, or makes less than $125k a year. Harvard, as I mentioned, essentially gives free tuition up to $150k. MIT’s threshold is $200k. Families in these income ranges are doing pretty well for themselves.

And then when students graduate from these schools they have a pretty easy path to being rich themselves. The degree, the connections, and possibly the education itself provided a pathway towards six figure jobs, maybe $200k+, before the age of 30.

So no, I think these schools are a pretty good value proposition for even the middle class. Upper middle class has to pay the highest percentage of their own income, but it’s still worth the cost for them.

All the schools rip off the rich to subsidize the middle class. You’re essentially subsidizing a bunch of students who are paying close to nothing.m, because you can afford $70k tuition.

As another example, Harvard is free for anyone whose family makes less than $85k per year. Not just the tuition ($56k per year), but also the housing (worth $13k), food ($8k), health insurance ($1600), books, and a modest living stipend designed to cover things like a computer, commuting/travel, other expenses.

And those who make up to $150k per year are capped at 10% of their income to pay for all that. In the end, the average cost of Harvard for the typical student is about $15,000 per year including housing and food.

In other words, attending Harvard is cheaper than not attending school for anyone whose families make less than $150k, which is basically 75% of the nation. So if you’re actually paying full tuition, you’re probably pretty rich.

The hilarious thing was that she was actually acquitted of scamming patients. She was only convicted of scamming investors for claiming that patients could be treated using false tests.

I’m more than willing to buy products elsewhere, but it’s so easy to default to Amazon.

One of the practices that the FTC sued Amazon over was their requirement that sellers list their lowest prices on Amazon and outsource fulfillment (and give up a huge cut) to Amazon in order to qualify for Prime and good search results.

The result is that even though most sellers can afford to sell on their own store and keep a larger percentage of the sales revenue, they’re not allowed to actually undercut Amazon’s prices. And so Amazon has shielded itself from price competition, despite engaging in pretty expensive practices (free 2 day shipping for most items and places, free 1-day or even same day shipping for some items in some places). And they did it with contracts instead of actually competing.

The state of passenger rail in the United States on lines that don’t serve New York City is pretty pathetic, so I’d think that an increase in the number of New York passengers, by itself, would actually represent a significant increase in the total number of passengers, nationally.

Hiroshima’s bomb was Little Boy, which contained 64 kg of uranium, which at 19.1 g/cm^3 would be about 3.3 liters, significantly larger than a cricket ball.

But Nagasaki’s Fat Man used about 6.2 kg of plutonium, which has roughly the same density as uranium, although the implosion mechanism to initiate the chain reaction compressed it to about half the volume. So that’s closer to a cricket ball.

But also to add even more nuance, the plutonium in Fat Man used a uranium tamper to reflect neutrons, and estimates are that about 30% of the explosion yield was due to fission of the uranium too. So it’s hard to really draw the line on what was or wasn’t the “explosive” in that bomb.

and the seats were only a little bit bigger than economy flight seats

I find them to be much larger, comparable to business class on an airplane. It’s much, much easier for me to get work done on a laptop (or eat a meal) on an Amtrak train than on economy seats, or even economy plus seats. Plus having a lot more aisle space to walk around is huge.

The CEO is just saying “people want to take the train”. Oh, really? That’s what you think, guy who stands to profit if people take the train?

It’s not the CEO, it’s the chair of the board of directors. Amtrak is government chartered and majority owned by the US government, and its board of directors are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, essentially making it a government position.

And it’s two paragraphs out of like 10, where several other experts were interviewed and quoted.

I have my beef with Newsweek, but your criticism here misses the mark.

Ok, I see where your source went wrong. Par for the course for Investopedia, which tends to get a lot of little details wrong (and sometimes misses the mark on the applicable scope of data that someone else has reported). But they’ve cited the Economic Policy Institute study of 2021 incomes, which looks at the average (mean) earnings within that group, rather than the actual amount that represents the boundary of that group. So it’s not that it takes $3.1 million to be in the top 0.1%, it’s that all the people of the top 1% average out to $3.1 million per year. Which, for the type of power distribution for household or individual incomes, is skewed heavily by the people who have the highest amounts.

And looking at the mean within that group can be fine, for certain purposes, but they’ve gone with the incorrect headline of saying “how much income puts you in the top 10%, 5%, 1%, 0.1%?” So it’s a headline that is wrong, that reports on a different number within the data.

And your own comment, saying that reaching each percentile “starts at” the reported number, is also wrong.

Because holy shit does “dqydj.com” look sketchy as fuck.

It just stands for “don’t quit your day job” and I’ve found that it’s a reliable resource for statistical data that’s widely available (like the ASEC numbers published by the Census Bureau and left to other people to actual turn into data visualization). It’s up to date, and the data matches the summary report on the Census website, so what’s the problem? The summary only reports the 90th and 95th percentiles, though, so I needed to find someone who actually reported on the thresholds for 99 (and not the averages within the top 1%).

The whole system is broken to the core, with lots of bad actors making it worse: insurers, providers (hospitals, clinics, labs, even nursing homes and hospices), drug companies, medical device manufacturers, and all the different scammers who operate in the space trying to rip off patients in addition to all of the above. All the money sloshing around in American health care attracts all the scammers, which creates a death spiral where the cat and mouse game on either side creates so much overhead that there’s a lot of money in it, which attracts scammers to complete the cycle.

Well yeah, that’s what the doctor said too!

Not sure where you’re getting your income percentiles from.

This site shows that 90th percentile (top 10%) household starts at $230k and 99th percentile (top 1%) starts at $631k.

For individuals the same site shows that the 10% starts at $150k and the 1% starts at $430k.

That shouldn’t mean we make up the facts.

You’re the one getting facts wrong!

You’ve said that the Jones-affiliated bid was higher, which is incorrect. The Onion’s $7 million bid was higher, which is why the bankruptcy judge said that the other bidder should’ve been given an opportunity to improve its bid.

You’ve said that the $7 million valuation wasn’t based on anything. It’s a straightforward formula for determining the value when to reduce the claims of the creditors who wanted to credit bid.

You’ve said that the $7 million valuation was made up based on estimates of future cash flows. Future payments have nothing to do with the bid, and weren’t used in the formula to calculate the value at $7 million. That value is how much this bid brings to the estate immediately.

Even future payments were a percentage of profits and but not guaranteed.

That’s not part of the bid. The bid only had two components: a cash portion and a commitment to reduce claims by certain creditors. For non-participating creditors, it’s the exact same equivalent as a $7 million cash payment to the estate.

Future promises were made to families to incentivize them to reduce their claims (and therefore bring more money to the estate), but that’s not part of the bid itself.

I think you’re struggling to understand what’s happening here because you’re so anchored on your initial incorrect perceptions.

There was some future payments promised

It’s not future payments promised. Just a division of who to split the proceeds with. And so for the typical creditor who didn’t credit bid, The Onion’s bid was worth the equivalent of a $7 million cash bid, and therefore was more valuable than the Jones affiliates’ $3.5 million cash bid.

It’s just math. The Onion bid was higher, and the judge said that the losing bid should’ve been given an opportunity to improve the bid to get a chance to win, and maybe raise even more money.

The value of the Onion’s bid was $7 million ($1.75 million in cash, $5.25 million in credit), when you include the credit bids from the families. That’s where you’re getting tripped up in trying to understand what the court was ruling.

They are not telling the onion to offer more money, they are giving the one with the highest bid the chance to make it even bigger.

No, the Jones-affiliated bidder had a smaller bid, but should’ve been given the opportunity to try to outbid the then-highest bid from the Onion.

Basically the judge said that the trustee, as auctioneer, should’ve gotten the two bidders into a bidding war to maximize the price.

I’ve been following this closely.

The normal way bankruptcy auctions go is basically some version of this:

1. Everyone who wants to bid has to sign an NDA about the assets.
2. Everyone who signs the NDA can perform their due diligence, look at financial statements and other confidential information about the assets in the auction, to figuratively kick the tires. If there’s actual physical property involved, bidders are generally allowed to physically inspect it (if it’s a tractor, for example, you can bring a mechanic to help sort out the tractor’s condition).
3. Before the deadline, every bidder submits a secret bid to the trustee.
4. The trustee evaluates the bids, looks to see which is best, and decides whether the top bids are close enough to hold a live public auction or allow topping bids for the bidders to say “hey you’re only $1 million short from the current top bid, you want to throw more money at this?,” and going around and around until the trustee is sure they’ve gotten the best and final bid from everyone.

The judge is upset that the trustee didn’t really do step 4, which in the bankruptcy process is designed to squeeze out the highest possible price for the sale. The losing bidder says they submitted a lower bid than their absolute top “best and final” they would have, because they thought they’d have an opportunity to improve the bid in a step that never happened.

So they’re going back to do it again. Presumably the trustee will propose a new auction process that explicitly puts out well defined rules on how creditors (like the Sandy Hook families) can credit bid with credit against their own claims, instead of actual cash. They’ll need to calculate exactly how much each dollar of credit bid brings to the non-participating creditors (like Sandy Hook families who don’t want to credit bid), and make sure that for each creditor who isn’t credit bidding gets the most money out of the sale.

I don’t think it’s over. The judge specifically said that he believes the trustee tried to do the right thing, but ultimately didn’t follow a process that was designed to raise the most money.