bardam

Your information is correct in general, but there are many exceptions that prove the grandparent correct. My apartment was built in the last 10 years (i.e., after 1970), rents for close to $4k, and IS rent stabilized. See information here:

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/rentguidelinesboard/resources/rent...

Specifically:

"Also, some newly constructed buildings may be stabilized due to a 421-a or J-51 tax exemption even if the rent is $2,000 or more."

A program that a significant number of developers have taken advantage of.

In NYC the cost of buying/selling an coop/condo can be more than 10% of the total purchase/sale price. See for reference:

https://www.brickunderground.com/blog/2015/03/closing_costs

So the cost to buy/sell a $1mm apartment could be in the range of $110,000 after broker fees and all taxes are accounted for. An apartment at that price would rent for maybe $4k for month, though that will rise at a faster price over 30 years than a fixed mortgage + common charges. Unless the value rises at a pace much faster than the rate of inflation, you're going to lose money if you don't hold on to the place for a few years. See this fun calculator to find the inflection point:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

Qlik was sold to Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm, about two years ago for $3B.

Not sure if that's a relative bargain compared to this deal or if it makes the $15.7B look totally unrealistic. As of a few years ago the total revenue of the two firms wasn't that different.

> Wrong. NASA funding now is high as it was during avg. appollo years.

That's not a true statement, unless you're talking about non-adjusted nominal dollars (that while technically true, is somewhat misleading). In inflation adjusted terms, the current budget is less than half of what it was during the Apollo years. Expressed as a percent of the federal budget, current funding is 1/8th of what it was at its max, though that's largely a function of the growth of non-discretionary federal spending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

If by the future, you mean five years ago: https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/18/amazon-pre-ships/

"Amazon has filed a patent for a shipping system designed to cut delivery times by predicting what buyers are going to buy before they buy it — and shipping products in their general direction, or even right to their door, before the sales click even (or ever) falls."

Realistically they were looking at items added to your cart but not yet purchased, and moving them to a closer distribution center in case you purchased.

Yes. In 2016 the FTC stopped Shinola from claiming their watches were "made" in America. Much more accurately they were "assembled" in America (Detroit) from foreign parts [1].

I entirely agree with the FTC, their claims were dishonest. As a point of comparison, Switzerland regulates what percentage of the watch must be Swiss before it can be claimed to be "Swiss," but it's not an easy question. For example, with completely made up numbers, low wage Chinese manufacturer sells mostly finished movement for $20 that required 4 hours to make. High wage Swiss assembler puts in another hour, at a cost of $40. Total time is 5 hours, 80/20 Chinese/Swiss and total cost is 60, 33/67 Chinese/Swiss. From time perspective, it's a Chinese watch, but from cost perspective it's Swiss.

[1] - https://www.truthinadvertising.org/revisiting-shinolas-made-...

Also of interest, Malcolm Galdwell's podcast* "Revisionist History" had an excellent episode on CTE in football. He made an analogy to smoking. Evidence had long suggested that smoking was dangerous, but it was only that -- evidence, not hard proof. Evidence continued to pile up, but so did the counter evidence (primarily from tobacco firms and those they funded). At what point do we say -- OK, maybe the evidence isn't 100%, but isn't there enough evidence to suggest something is wrong?

* http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/22-burden-of-proof

See this N.Y. Times article focusing on Plattsburgh, NY: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/nyregion/bitcoin-mining-n...

See St. Louis Fed data from FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP

It's true that manufacturing jobs are on the rise, but it's still fairly clear what the long term trend looks like.

Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky, a husband and wife team who have been translating Russian novels for close to 30 years. Having read most of Dostoevsky's works, some their translations, some others, I highly recommend their translations when available.