volak

100k in loans for an English degree

Demand a refund not a handout

Something equivalent that teen boys "adore" like girls and boy bands and twilight?

I can only think of video games.. perhaps anime, possibly comics.

All of which are widely mocked.

Its not that girl's interests are taboo - its that when any gender gets too wrapped up in something that it becomes part of their identity society should mock to encourage adoption of other interests.

Some juicy federal crimes we're all expected to know from @CrimeADay on Twitter

26 USC §5674(b) & 27 CFR §25.144(a) make it a federal crime for a brewer to remove beer from a brewery in a keg that has the name of more than one brewer on it.

21 USC §§331, 333 & 21 CFR §169.115(a) make it a federal crime to sell French dressing if less than 35% of its weight is vegetable oil.

43 USC §1733 & 43 CFR §6302.20(e) make it a federal crime to pick someone up from a federal wilderness area using a hot air balloon.

7 USC §8303, §8313 & 9 CFR §93.318(b) make it a federal crime to bring an American horse back into the United States after being in a Canadian rodeo without a health certificate.

42 USC §6928 & 40 CFR §257.3–8(b) make it a federal crime to start a dangerous garbage fire.

21 USC §331, 333, 343 & 21 CFR §155.201(a)(2)(v) make it a federal crime to sell canned "random sliced" mushrooms unless they were sliced in a random manner.

One could make a fairly good argument they already do.

Especially if you watched the testimony from that professor explaining how Google shifts search results to push GOTV in certain distinct counties while excluding others. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSTHgoaVtSw

Net Neutrality is a solution in search of a problem.

The only argument for it is a fictional story based on photoshopped ads. Government should not be regulating internet content.

Just wanted to point out that 3 of those 4 countries are surrounded by miles of open water/ocean. And the final one has been lying about the outbreak the entire time. https://www.independent.co.uk/world/covid19-china-mishandle-...

I think the app should be called "Captain Hindsight"

I agree it wouldn't sell very well.

But postmortems in the tech world do trend sometimes

a news cycle postmortem - someone pitch this in an elevator

That's why such a news app would be so interesting.

I remember comments from back then slightly differently.

I would pay a subscription to a news site if they spent all their time evaluating 2-5 year old events and determining which side was right.

2 years ago comments of "this will only benefit the lawyers" would be -50 points. Turns out... actually yeah.

A deal like this would likely be worth half a million at least. Perhaps even a couple billion.

Repurchasing shares is what companies do with profits they cannot effectively leverage into new investments. I suggest you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_repurchase

But to sum up: if you are a company with $1 million on hand at the end of the year you have to disperse it somehow.

- If you put it in a bank account you'll earn 0.2% interest on your "investment"

- If you pay out dividends your shareholders will earn 1-2% (estimate) on their investments

- If you buy back your own stock your shareholders can see 4-5% (estimate) on their investments + you have shares you can award to employees in the form of options or direct without diluting the market

The number 1 factor in your decision? Taxes. Which option pays the least tax? Option 3

Not true actually. The majority of employees do not get fired. Only a minority do

And the minority that is let go get 3-6 months of severance and unemployment benefits until they inevitably find a new job - which btw is far easier to do when you are not an executive of a floundering business.

You are assuming this deal is the same as previous ones. Its not even close

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/united-airlines-details-it...

Grants for employee salaries and benefits like health insurance, low interest loan to be paid back, and a stake in the company in the form of equity. And all with strings attached so they can't hand out bonuses or lobby congress.

Businesses operate on revenue and margin and companies like airlines can't justify using even 1% of its revenue to "save" for rainy days. Their tickets have to be as cheap as possible and they have to market to as many people as possible. Its unreasonable to ask them to lay out millions on the chance an act of god rolls through.

As a company they have plenty of ways to raise capital to weather major events, including selling stock, which is what they are doing - to the government in exchange for favorable loans and a grant.

But as I pointed out in the original post - the 10B in fees is in line with revenue the banks receive during normal times. And going off the earnings the banks posted last week, they are losing millions every day just keeping the lights on.

There is no increased earnings there is in fact very big losses. Which is another thing people tend to forget when discussing exec pay. The execs take a hit when business is bad, but the majority of employees continue getting paid.

Exec pay is high but you can't forget that much of the risk / responsibility should the business do poorly is on their heads not the majority of the workforce.

His post is not addressing this issue of bank fees hes making a wider point about bailouts in general.

I am simply reminding him that airline companies who did nothing wrong have people depending on them for their paychecks. Exactly the same as a child depends on their parent.

And in this case the money given to AIRLINES helps a lot of parents feed their children

Agreed - which is why I strongly support the administration demanding equity in the companies that are receiving money.

And I only support money given as loans which must be paid back. Any kind of grant money must be exclusively used for payroll or other qualifying operating expenses.

The current stimulus is not perfect but its pretty good and FAR better than 2008

Its not necessarily a question of what they could do. Its an emergency and time was valuable.

Banks have thousands if not millions of employees capable of performing basic due diligence before sending out money. A fed task force tasked with processing applications from millions of businesses would be capable of handing out money maybe summer 2021

The banks have a preexisting relationship with these businesses and know what they would need / qualify for. Plus provide boots on the ground for vetting.

The best the government could do was send a paltry check to pretty much EVERY american. I'm sure you'd object if they decided to send 1 million dollars to EVERY small business.

That's the best a fed government run program could accomplish with only a couple of weeks.

There has been no general business failure during this crisis. The government is mandating businesses be closed and businesses and employees are suffering because of it.

If you are only talking about 2008 then yes - that bailout was fucking dumb

The best analogy I use for logical errors such as this is -

If you have a dependent - ie a child - whom you are a primary source of care. Should you qualify for a bigger helping hand than say, the 25 year old with no children?

If you agree - then now imagine you have 500 dependents. Or in the case of some corps 500,000.

You have half a million dependents who rely on you every other week for a paycheck.

Do you qualify for a larger helping hand than the 25 year old who lives alone?

This program is vastly different from the 2008 bailouts. The banks collected a modest fee for doing work spreading money around to people who need to pay employees and rent.

In this situation the banks are simply a truck driver and small businesses are your local grocery store.

Im not going to fault the truck driver for asking to be paid to do work.

The 10B they collected was not from the government - it was paid by businesses applying for loans.

If you know of a better way to spread 600 billion amongst 5-10 million small businesses without going through the local banks these businesses use please share with the class?

Businesses are not a charity - according to reported Q1 earnings last week they're losing million of dollars everyday just keeping the lights on.

They've lost far more even with the fees they collected from this program.

As someone said above - doctors are not working for free, why should bank employees?

Banks make somewhere around 450 billion in revenue each year. https://www.statista.com/forecasts/409713/banking-revenue-in...

This program made them 1/3 of 1 month's normal revenue

Michigan has banned selling seeds.

Governors are forcing businesses closed or no seating allowed.

Those guidelines are good ones to maintain for perpetuity. Would decrease the thousands of flu deaths we see each year too but today's situation is closer to a nationwide lockdown than a PSA about washing hands

Some quick research

https://www.nber.org/papers/w23192?fbclid=IwAR15UAkVuakNeQrl...

100,000 more drug overdoeses per 1% unemployment

Also https://www.webmd.com/depression/news/20110414/suicides-go-u...

Framing the debate as "your grandma or your 401k" is precisely the gas lighting that prevents rational discussion on this topic

New counter strike ish game Valorant also just confirmed a similar anti-cheat system driver https://old.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/fzxdl7/anticheat_...

Sure I'll take a shot at being a modeler -

You take temp readings from various wildlife zones around the world, and calculate how many less bears you see for each degree increase in temperature. Then extrapolate that to humans by a simple equation designed to compare bear survivability to humans.

Obviously the models need to be able to understand how temp readings equate to survivability. Population counts from various sites would obviously fit that need