The rate seems to be 23%, and given that this is only a sales tax this would mean the federal government is taxing at maybe 10-15% of GDP. If I remember correctly, federal government expenditures are around 30% of GDP.
I honestly think this is no longer correct. Construction costs exceed the future value of the rental income stream for multifamily developments in most markets. Apparently the only projects that pencil out now are massive developments, which are hard to build in places where people work as they are already somewhat dense and don't have many empty fields. The cost of materials are going back to normal (with some exceptions) but the labor costs are increasing due to a shortage of workers. Construction costs could be slightly lowered by reducing the required quality of construction, but not by much.
Agree with the first sentence. I worked at a couple of national labs and the number one priority is to keep the lab open by justifying the flagship project. NIF has a long history of disappointments so it's nice to see some success, but it still isn't clear building this thing was justified. The main rationale during the planning stages was "stockpile stewardship" which loosely translate into "making jobs for nuclear weapons scientists even though we aren't building any."
Prince did it right. His fan club members could buy tickets, with some sort of frequent flyer benefits (better tickets for more loyal fans). The genius was that you did not get the tickets or know where they were in the venue until you were literally walking into the venue. Most of the front row was reserved for fan club members, and the people sitting there didn't know they were going to be there on that night.
I've read that the artists and promoters prefer that Ticketmaster takes the heat. The top artists get almost all of the ticket face value and the promoter cut comes out of a kickback on the convenience fee. Ticketmaster also does a better job now of reducing the gap between face value and resale value. Bruce Springsteen ran real dynamic pricing for his tickets and the fans are mad at him -- better to do what Taylor Swift did and blame Ticketmaster for the high prices.
I was at the corner of Bancroft Ave and Hegenberger waiting at a light last year. I got passed on the right by two helmetless people riding an offroad ATV and all I could think was "I can't believe they are driving in the bike lane."
But long term treasury yields are now lower than short term treasury yields. This indicates that the market expects inflation and interest rates to drop in the future. As long as this is true, prices for houses will not go down as everyone assumes that a refi will be possible in 1-2 years. Housing market will be stuck while this sorts itself out.
My Reels recommendations are exclusively attractive women doing sexually suggestive things -- is that AI expertise? It's horrible. Does the platform have other content?
The tweet by @Anthony was deleted within a few minutes of me responding (could be coincidental of course) [1]
The disturbing part is how the retweet chain between the reporters on Twitter changed the story: The original Tweet was "Entire team of data engineers let go." That became "Twitter data engineering team..." That became "Twitter's entire data engineering team let go"
Needless to say "Entire team of data engineers" is much smaller in scope than "Twitter's entire data engineering team." The WSJ reporter who posted this tweet made an egregious error (even before the hoax was revealed).
If this is a normal Silicon Valley deal, until Twitter relists or sells the valuation at vest of the already granted RSUs will be $54.20. So from an employee perspective the valuation will stay high.
Exclusive content is the only way they (or any streaming service) can become profitable. With recorded music, they have to pay a revenue share to the artists and Spotify's percentage does not increase as they grow. With exclusive content, however, they pay once and as the audience grows the additional listeners are pure profit. So, the goal is to increase the percentage of owned content consumed on the platform and give less of the subscription fees to the record labels.
The exclusive tracks model does not work for music artists because they want ubiquitous distribution. Music is unlike video in that people consume the same content over and over again, and also unlike video in that the artists make the big bucks off of live performances.
This is why SiriusXM can pay Howard Stern $100M per year and still be wildly profitable. It reduces their dependence on royalty incurring content.
The primary flaw in the constitution is that smaller states have disproportionate power (Senate and Electoral College) and will never give up or dilute this power.
Even worse, equal representation for each state in the Senate is literally the only part of the constitution that cannot be amended.
So even with overwhelming popular support there is an absolute barrier to reform.
Who manages the properties if Pacaso goes under? It seems to be the risk in this model, particularly if the LLC owners are not able to contract cleaning and maintenance services at reasonable rates.
Fairness and efficiency are often at odds. As a reviewer, I was sometimes asked to review papers from unknown authors at unknown institutions. My level of effort was likely proportional to how well I knew the quality of the institution from which the paper came. There is a great deal of time involved in understanding a paper well enough to do a full review.
The author says he is in AI, and when I was hiring entry level ML engineers I had similar challenges. As much as we blame the recruiting pipeline, I think it is the educational pipeline that is not creating a sufficiently diverse talent pool. Part of it is "weed out" courses that adversely affect students from less privileged backgrounds[1]. An additional (perhaps controversial) opinion I have is that companies are so aggressive about their individual diversity goals that they often pluck students out of the training pipelines prematurely (e.g. courting Ph.D. students before they finish their dissertation).
I don't expect prices to drop much because they are based on the assumption that interest rates will drop and new homeowners can refinance later. We see that with the inverted Treasury yield curve where long term interest rates are projected to be lower than today's rates. Also, with current homeowners locked into their low rates, there will be a shortage of houses on the market (you can't take your low mortgage rate to a new house). So the people buying now will be buyers that absolutely need to and/or buyers with lots of cash that expect to refinance later. The only people selling now are people that absolutely need to.
Maybe Serial launched the modern commerically produced crime podcast format, but I'd give a shout out to The History of Rome by Mike Duncan as the "defining podcast." It started quite a bit earlier (2007) and proved that there is a big audience (65 million downloads) for obscure topics covered in depth. Serial spun out of This American Life, so it had some audience to begin with, but THOR is truly "let me put this out there and see if anyone listens." It's also interesting to see how apologetic Mike Duncan was when he introduced monetization through direct to consumer ads, and this is now the standard monetization model.
When my kids were in public elementary school there was a teacher that was so bad that most families who had children assigned to that teacher simply left the school. The administration was going through the procedure to get the teacher removed but it was going to take more than one year. They finally came up with the solution of having the terrible teacher become a "social studies specialist" and have her teach a few hours weekly to every single classroom in the school, thereby diluting her awfulness among the maximum number of students.
I think he used some combination of a pension and the unlimited homestead exemption in Florida to shield most of his assets. Since we don't have debtors prisons there is not much you can do to make people pay.
The details of what constitutes an investor are unclear. It's possible they made the mistake of labeling purchases by trusts as investor purposes when many individuals buy houses directly into their trusts for estate planning purposes. I've seen that error made in these analyses, either inadvertently or deliberately for purposes of embellishing the problem.
Check out the AppLovin financials[1]. Even if you've never heard of them, they have strong revenue growth, line of sight to high profitability, and a diversified revenue stream. Their revenue in 2022 projects to be triple that of Unity.
My family is going to Dollywood this summer during a visit to Tennessee. A one day ticket is $84, but a 3 day ticket is only $114. So, yes, Disneyland is "accept no substitutes" pricing.
I would argue that Disneyland should be even more expensive. As Yogi Berra once said (paraphrasing) "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded." People that simultaneously complain about Disneylands price and the crowds are delusional.
I've seen a few places that Stanford and Harvard are close to 50/50 on cross admits now, and that Stanford has even passed Harvard a few times (which no school has ever done). Likely a lot to do with press around Stanford students becoming rich Silicon Valley founders. My original point is that there has been a lot of changes in how students perceive schools that may not get reflected in the US News ratings.
My personal opinion is that students are highly influenced by where the best students in the grades above them chose to apply, where they got in, and where they eventually chose to go. The software the students use also ranks how likely they are to get into each college/university based on the past performance of students at their high school with similar grades and test scores.
The revealed preference rankings use co-admittance data (student got into Harvard and Stanford) along with that student's final choice (went to Stanford) to rank the schools. The military academies will have a huge edge because their decisions come out later and most students are highly committed once they continue their application to that point (they've gotten congressional recommendations, passed physical exams, etc.). So basically throw those out.
My kid just went through college selection process and I can assure you that the US News rankings are largely irrelevant in terms of decision making. The revealed preference score[1] or global university rankings[2] are much closer to how students, their counselors, and their parents rank the universities. For instance, any ranking that does not have Stanford first among non specialized US universities (i.e. excluding MIT, Caltech, Julliard, etc.) is suspect.
Some of the building codes are probably overkill, but part of the difference in California building costs compared to other states are energy efficiency requirements (like more expensive windows) that quickly pay for themselves in reduced costs to live in the unit and also reduce per capita energy usage. Unfortunately, neither the developer or landlord (if the unit is built for a rental) has incentive to build an energy efficient building as the tenant is going to eventually pay the energy costs. These requirements absolutely need government regulation because the "free market" leads to a non optimal outcome.
I've been chatting with some friends whose company shut down recently, basically with no warning. They are getting recruited like crazy. In my opinion that's much preferable than to being left go as part of the 20% lowest performing employees. This reads like a "culling of the herd because we can use the alleged upcoming recession as an excuse" event. I'm not sure the generous severance makes up for the "you are not in the top 80%" label.