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?
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?
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.
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.
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).
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)
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...
