neilknowsbest

Both of these views are consistent with each other. Most people are honest and issue few referrals. But the few people who are dishonest issue loads of referrals. Therefore, most of the referrals a company gets are from dishonest people.

I've been to the Moffat Tunnel many times and I never realized there was a water project associated with the better known rail tunnel there. FWIW, I've also never seen any sort of security there. Besides a lone Gilpin county sheriff's deputy who lives out along that road and makes it his life's mission to ticket any vehicle parked illegally on the county road.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has a great quarterly report on consumer credit [0], which the article briefly mentions. The latest report (Q1 2025) is here [1]. Student loan delinquencies shot up in the last ~2 quarters, which checks out with TFA. It's amazing how the age 50+ cohorts carry substantial student loan debt (slide 21). Is this original debt from their own time as students or is it, for lack of a better word, "second-hand" debt from supporting their children through school?

[0] - https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc/background.ht...

[1] - https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/Interactives/househo...

To add a little more detail, ES is the e-mini S&P 500 futures contract traded on the CME. The way it works is that you put up some amount of money called the "margin", and you get to buy or sell a larger "notional" valued contract. The difference between the margin that you put up and the greater notional value is the implicit leverage that parent comment refers to.

You can find the contract specs on the CME's website here [0]. The implicit leverage is actually a bit greater than the parent comment says. The contract notional value is defined as $50 x Index Value, which is currently around 6500. So the contract represents close to $325,000 and the exchange's margin requirement is around $21,000. Interactive Brokers seems to require similar margin [1]. The margin requirement is around 6.5% of the notional value, i.e. 15x leverage. So a 6.5% decrease in the S&P 500 would wipe out the account.

Not sure why the parent comment is downvoted, I suppose it has a moralizing tone?

[0] - https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/equities/sp/e-mini-sandp500...

[1] - https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/trading/margin-futures...

The imperative for the government is to reduce the deadweight loss of under-improved land. Whether or not the owner chooses to improve should be their choice, but there is an opportunity cost to not improving.

Absent a LVT, that opportunity cost is mostly born by the people who don't own the land, i.e. the coffee shop that _could_ have been there instead of whatever lower value use is there now. With a LVT, that opportunity cost falls more on the person who owns the land, i.e. the owner wants to keep their SFH in the urban neighborhood, but now pays a higher tax which reflects that under-improvement.

PR has a dry season when the island receives less rain, and there are dry regions that generally get less rain. In fact, there are sometimes forest fires [1].

Regarding construction, I've never seen a smoke alarm inside a residential building in PR. I would hazard a guess that this is allowed for concrete/cinderblock; presumably the roof thing is the same.

[1] - https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/seguridad/notas/incendio...

Model trains and New Jersey? I assumed it was about Northlandz [0]. I haven't been there in several decades, but I guess it's still in business. Very neat.

[0] - https://northlandz.com/

It appears to be the Soka University of America.

https://www.soka.edu/about/faculty-staff/ryan-allen

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

The reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amager_Bakke

I'm curious about that quote. To my mind, we don't farm because we're trying to use land to "create energy", we farm because it produces food that humans demand in order to live. Is there some way to satisfy humans' need for food using solar panels? Is there a way of synthesizing consumable food using only electricity and ambient air, maybe add a bit of water, etc?

It just feels a bit silly to imply that the point of farming is to produce energy, in a general sense.

To be sure, Puerto Rico is a territory of the US. I imagine that making deals with China as you describe would draw the ire of Washington, if it's even "legal" in the first place.

I don't think there is any misunderstanding. The issues are with local distribution, not generation or transmission. So it's simply a matter of prioritizing the restoration of distribution circuits which serve hospitals, seniors, etc. They don't need to have separate circuits and separate power plants that exclusively serve those loads in order for them to be prioritized.

There are some good arguments against that. It creates a deadweight loss by banning high utility private uses of the car (driving kid to hospital) and instead there would be an increase in low utility "work" uses of the car (delivering a single banana to a bodega). There is a parent out there who would be willing to pay $X to drive their kid to hospital, and a work vehicle user who would forgo paying $X by staying off the road, but under a blanket ban that won't happen.

It would also increase the incentive for people to play games like claiming their personal car as a "work vehicle", throwing a little advertising decal on the side, things like that.

I believe there is a distinction between profits for "transmission" specifically and for electric utilities more broadly. The FERC ruling that you reference is for PG&E's transmission assets, i.e. high voltage lines and transformers and such. I assume that their retail electric business is regulated by CPUC and has a different profit/revenue/whatever arrangement.

Similar to this is the Weyerhaeuser headquarters building [0] in Federal Way, WA. The campus is also home to the Pacific Bonsai Museum, which is a real gem. Not too far out of the way for anyone visiting Seattle (just a little ways south of the airport).

[0] - https://www.som.com/projects/weyerhaeuser-corporate-headquar...

I was skeptical too, but it's plausible. According to the Federal Reserve's Distributional Financial Accounts release [0], the bottom 90%'s share of "corporate equities and mutual fund shares" in Q4 2023 was about 13% (5.24 / 39.94)

[0] - https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

What exactly does "stat arb" mean in this context? I assumed it meant "statistical arbitrage", so I was expecting the article to talk about a pairs trading strategy or something in that vein, i.e. a strategy that relies on a statistical relationship. But this seems to be more what I would call "geographical" or "locational" arbitrage where they're trading price differentials in the same instrument between multiple venues.

You're right in principle, but larger interconnections aren't a panacea.

The reality of Uri is that the neighboring regions to the north (SPP) and east (MISO) were on the brink themselves (grid emergency and rolling blackouts in SPP), and the import capacity from their neighboring regions (i.e. the midwest) was constrained; they couldn't import more power from their neighbors. If Texas were part of the Eastern Interconnection AC grid (i.e. connected to SPP and MISO), I think fewer people in Texas would have lost power and more people in Oklahoma. SPP and MISO just didn't have any more power in those areas to ship them.

SPP & MISO have been interconnected with each other forever, they're on the same AC grid. But the capacity between their systems is limited, hence the blackouts in SPP. They just never bothered to build out the capacity because it hasn't made a lot of economic sense. I think that's the best counterfactual example of "what would have happened if Texas didn't have their own grid", and it suggests that the storm still would have been a problem.

The stacked line chart [1] of daily production by basin on the wiki page is very misleading. Following through to the source EIA data [2] and comparing Feb 2021 against Jan and March 2021 shows permian production down 19% from "average", the biggest decrease of the reported basins. The other basins you mentioned were between 13 and 18% below their "average". Of course this is a pretty big extrapolation from a monthly average number...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Natural_gas_production_an... [2] - https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/where-our-na...

Policy?

I agree with your general argument (retail consumers overwhelmingly do not face instantaneous price signals).

However, I think you can "panic buy" electricity. I live in a place with unreliable electricity. On hot days, I'm more inclined to cool my house with the AC earlier/colder than I would if I could absolutely count on the electricity being available. If the power goes out, at least my house is cool for a short while.

He's a retired businessman. They met, by chance, years ago when he was in South Korea to close the construction contract for his 50-boat fishing fleet with Hyundai.

Aside: I thought there was some sort of requirement that NYPD officers must live inside the city?

I wanna know how he managed to initiate a wire for $35MM online (and approximately 100% of account balance), presumably to a brand new recipient, and only got a single phone call and the wire request wasn't rejected. Maybe things have changed, but my experience now is that I'd have to go into a branch to do that wire, and I'd probably get the normal verification call plus another from the account manager.

Failed banks that have been resolved by the FDIC have, in fact, seen depositors lose money on non-insured deposits (i.e. deposits in excess of the insurance limits). FDIC makes payments, called "dividends", to depositors. The history of dividend payments for failed banks can be found here [0]. For reference, SVB has about $200B in assets.

The largest failure to-date was WaMu in the 2008 financial (approx $300B in assets). Depositors were paid back 100%. The largest failure prior to WaMu was IndyMac (approx $100B in assets). Depositors were paid back 50%. No additional dividends have been paid out to depositors.

According to Wikipedia [1], the last three >$1B failures were Guaranty in 2017, Doral in 2015, and First National in 2013. Depositors in each of these three cases received less than 100%, averaging around 80%.

[0] - https://closedbanks.fdic.gov/dividends/ [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_failures_in_the_U...

To be sure, Lehman Brothers was not a depository institution. FDIC insurance protects only insured deposits up to the limits, and thus was not in play for creditors to Lehman.

FWIW, the creek bed there is almost certainly dry outside of flash flood events. It's a very arid region.

Along this vein, I've heard somewhere that pimps wear lots of jewelry because they can pawn it for bail money. Apparently cash can be seized on arrest, but jewelry is classified as some sort of personal property and thus won't be taken.

Interesting, I hadn't realized that. I always assumed that firms doing this were just reimbursing the employee and then putting the lunch/whatever expense onto their own books.

To be sure, $20 per day at ~250 days per year is $5k. And that's tax-free to the employee, so if they're going to be spending that money on lunch anyways, it is better for the employee to trade the $5k pretax salary for the lunch benefit.