Matt Waters

Fancy Dorms Aren’t The Main Reason Tuition Is Skyrocketing In 2000, Temple University was primarily a commuter school. On-campus dorms could house fewer than 4,000 students out of a total student body of more than 30,00…

At least up to 2016, lower per-student state support in real terms explained 75% of tuition increases.

fivethirtyeight.com/features/fan...

The thing is that CPI and PCE try to account for better health care, especially for new drugs and devices.

If median wages are deflated with the inflation metrics, they haven’t looked great. Some methods can get more wage growth, but they’re non-obvious. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

Health Insurance in America : Throughline Millions of Americans depend on their jobs for health insurance. But that's not the case in many other wealthy countries. How did the U.S. end up with a system that's so expensive, yet leaves so many ...

Eisenhower used employer health insurance to diffuse moves for single-payer. The super-tax-friendly nature of employer paid insurance set us on the course today. www.npr.org/2025/02/27/1...

It’s in the Schrödinger area of true and not true: The trifecta in 2009-10 could have nuked, passed M4A, did incredible levels of taxation on billionaires, etc.

But Dems openly stating that wouldn’t have gotten to power in the years before.

The EBITDA targets are Adjusted EBITDA excluding stock-based comp as well. So both the market-cap goals and the EBITDA goals can be gamed by issuing a lot of stock.

This reduces the percentage of the company in the awarded shares, but not necessarily the value if stock created=consideration.

The 12 market cap milestones are always binding. The lowest market cap milestone is taken off the shelf first.

Operational milestones are vehicle deliveries, deliveries of FSD, deliveries of robotaxis, deliveries of bots and 8 EBITDA targets.

I agonized over the original proxy, but I’m pretty sure “Covered Event“ only applies to 3 of the 12 operational milestones: the FSD, Bots and Robotaxis milestones.

A transition of 1/12 of unearned stock to unvested earned stock usually requires 1 of market cap milestone and 1 of operational hit.

A court’s oral order was very much not followed in the AEA case.

But that had to be done in a “trapdoor” sort of way. Ongoing, utter “make me” contempt on US soil (such as BOP or ICE not releasing somebody granted habeas) still opens too huge a huge can of worms for Trump.

Anyway, I feel hesitant with the textual argument since it feels like a gateway drug to the clerk not performing a ministerial duty for the pre-speaker roll call.

I think never providing any justification relating to election/age would have been akin to the extratextual justification provided. It also wasn’t mooted because of the back pay question, even though Powell was never sworn in (as text requires) when back pay would (did?) start.

I think it’s certain this SC would let him say nothing.

From reading Powell, I got the impression the Warren court just never considered the possibility the House would not give a justification or give a very non-colorable assertion about the election, age or residency.

It does appear to apply to 3 out of 12 operational goals, deliveries of bots, robotaxis and FSD. The market capitalization still has to be hit.

8 of the 12 operational goals are based on Adjusted EBITDA. That seems very easy to game.

Nuking the filibuster significantly eases the path for later DC/PR addition and court packing.

I mean, it’d be funny if Dems used the filibuster now successfully and then nuked it in 2029. But I don’t see that happening with 50 Dems.

Penalty for fingertips being past bottom of the shorts (as I remember the rule for girls in a Christian middle school).

Thanks. S&P has the full information undated on their rating. Besides the residual value guarantee, Meta also backstops the SPV’s minimum purchase of power from Entergy.

www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/r...

Note 9 to Meta’s 10-Q appears to indicate $81 billion of off-balance-sheet non-cancellable cloud commitments at 9/30/25.

Note 9 has an apparently additive commitment in Oct for $40 billion cloud capacity, Note 13 gives $28 bil for this LA data centers.

These total, I think, $150 billion off-BS.

Looking deeper into it, Meta is on the hook for 4 year lease. But the RVG mechanism has Meta pay the whole thing at lease non-renewal.

The RVG only pays if the JV does not sell the data centers. It reminds me of Citi’s liquidity puts in 08, where in theory they may not be used.

They never plan on getting caught.

I’ll admit flying blind (I’ve never even gotten a mortgage myself). I did have an investment in an originator who had a few files put back to them for document issues a year or so later. Rates had gone up in the meantime and so it was a loss on fixing the files.

I feel like the Meta deal could have still had the new debt perfected in the data centers themselves while issuing debt directly from Meta.

Especially with getting an SEC letter blessing its off-balance-sheet structure, it feels like Enron-esque non-tax accounting shenanigans.

The second and third points, as I understand them, will have their effectiveness really seen by whether the GSEs put back or reject any files.

Which probably will be fine, but it will be interesting how it will work out.

I fundamentally don’t understand the purpose of this de facto bond.

It first reminded me of Enron’s VIEs, but I give more credit to Meta than that. Dodging current VIE rules for pure accounting seems so dumb, with Zuck’s supervoting shares.

So what is the purpose of this? Securing Blue Owl?

A regular audit, where say 1% of precincts are counted by hand *after* the machine tabulations are done, consistently show tiny differences between machine and hand.

The random number/PRNG method for audits is described in the PDF and is all public.

Certification and possible challenges are much sooner. Georgia nevertheless hand counted every ballot in 2020 (and at least AZ’s was hand-counted afterwards). It didn’t matter.

Besides all the other testing and audits, RLAs actually work. www.cartercenter.org/resources/pd...

The US has far more elected positions than countries which hand-count.

With risk limiting audits, fraud not involving paper stuffing has to have bad machine counts (despite the testing) and either extremely improbable or somehow deficient sampling in the risk limiting audit.

The ultra-rich are different from you and me. Their tax rates are lower. In an innovative new research paper, UC Berkeley economists found that the total effective tax rates paid by the 400 richest Americans have declined sharply in recent years.

Effective tax rate, including corporate tax, on billionaires is 23%.

www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/ultra-r...

In theory, there is corporate tax and then either capital gains or estate tax. Because of basis step-up, up to $26 million of capital gains gains can be totally tax free on death.

Thankfully as a Duke alum, we have no problematic alumni whatsoever.

Actual outcomes will bubble up. Even if 2008 is credited to Obama’s skill, it’s tough to credit 2006 to, say, Pelosi as a magnetic popularism deliverer. The material outcomes of the Iraq war bubbled up.

And in the longer tail, how would Dem populism work if no policies such as ACA happened?