@BillAckman If spending is less than or equal to revenue the budget deficit is zero. The revenue comes from taxes, which as you point out is payed by NYC taxpayers. So, by your own description, this is bringing a budget deficit to zero.
English
SP
2.2K posts
How is getting $8 billion from State coffers and $2.3 billion from deferring pension payments bringing a budget down to zero?
The same NYC taxpayers that pay the bulk of NYC taxes are paying the $8 billion of state taxes that are funding the budget gap.
This budget ‘fix’ is robbing Peter to pay Paul and it didn’t work out well for either of them.
Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani@NYCMayor
When we came into office, we uncovered a $12 billion budget deficit. Today, I’m proud to say we brought it down to zero. We didn’t close the gap on the backs of working people. We closed it while funding parks, libraries, safer streets and making historic investments in public housing. Call it Pothole Politics. Call it Democratic Socialism. It's government that delivers for the people who make this city run. That’s what New Yorkers deserve. And that’s what we will keep fighting for every single day.
English
@amazingmap ?? Why would you do it per 1,000 women, not per 1,000 married couples?
English
Highest divorce rates (2023):
Nevada 3.8
Idaho 3.4
Wyoming 3.4
Oklahoma 3.3
Alaska 3.1
Utah 3.1
Lowest divorce rates (2023):
Louisiana 0.9
Illinois 1.2
Kansas 1.7
Massachusetts 1.8
Iowa 1.9
DC 1.9
Rates shown are annual divorces per 1,000 women age 15+.
English
@LeahLibresco @asymmetricinfo This is almost true, actually. At lidar wavelengths, skin reflectivity differences are smaller than they are at visible wavelengths. Also most people wear clothes. But it isn’t quite *literally* true.
English
Careful reporting by Kelsey here.
Atlantic should correct and apologize. Waymo uses lidar. It *literally* does not see race.
Kelsey Piper@KelseyTuoc
Are autonomous vehicles (self-driving cars) “less able to detect people of color”? That’s what I read in The Atlantic this weekend, in Xochitl Gonzalez’s “People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions.” It appears to be entirely false.
English
@jadler1969 @ScottGreenfield They are probably just pissed about the phone bans.
English
It seems they wish to prove him right.
Benjamin Ryan@benryanwriter
NYU professor @JonHaidt, who has stood at the forefront of the movement to challenge academia’s culture of suppressing the free exchange of ideas, is facing a campaign to cancel his graduation address. nytimes.com/2026/05/13/us/…
English
In some respects, today’s homebound kids aren’t that different from today’s homebound adults — “staying home” has gotten less boring which is good but also maybe destroying society.
slowboring.com/p/why-kids-don…
English
@benbawan @adam_tooze Car deaths. Flat in the US, remarkable drop in Europe. Car deaths have an outsized influence on life expectancy because a small number of outliers has a large effect on a mean.
English
Most Europeans 🇪🇺 live longer than Americans 🇺🇸 - we know that.
But what’s striking is that life expectancy relative to the US has increased in every single one of these European countries in the last two decades.
English
@dilanesper Come on, man. This line of argument is stupid. We don’t all take hundreds of oaths not to violate the hundreds of specific cultural norms we adhere to. Yet, we don’t think it at all unusual when people look askance at those who violate them.
English
And it's amazing to me that people go to weddings throughout their lives but haven't even noticed that actually nobody's taking oaths not to have sex with other people at the ceremony.
It's hard to talk about issues when people are that detached from reality.
English
Several people claimed in response to me that affairs violate an "oath". What "oath" is that? They don't swear you in as a witness or make you sign an affidavit under penalty of perjury to get married!
If you mean a "promise", well, even the wedding vows don't mention sex!
English
@qu1nn_peaks @BethMacLel15392 @WallStRollup Do Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Dell, or Google make your life easier in any way?
English
@BethMacLel15392 @SlopedPyramid @WallStRollup Billionaires have done absolutely nothing for me. Full stop. I will continue to demonize billionaires that only extract value and avoid taxation. He made it shorting cancer research startups so I don’t feel bad pointing fingers here
English
Ken Griffin has spoken out after the callout from Zohran:
The fallout? He's doubling down on Miami.
At Milken, the Hedge Fund CEO stated the following:
"We went to Miami and revised our building plan to make it a bigger office building"
“What the mayor of New York has made clear to my partners, and principally my New York partners, is that we need to double down on our bet in Miami"
“Looking at what Mamdani did to me and more broadly is doing to the city of New York is triggering the trauma I went through in Chicago”
English
@StriderTricker @ScottShapiroUXD @cblatts @dilanesper You have to explicitly tell it not to modify or correct spelling or grammar, or try to use context. The prompt should say you want a plain letter by letter transcript. If you have some code skills, look up OCR4all
English
@ScottShapiroUXD @SlopedPyramid @cblatts @dilanesper Thanks I will give that one a try. The biggest problem I have is that it just makes shit up. Adds info that isn’t there or interprets info wrong when all I want is a transcript. You should see what it said about the bacterial glycocalyx. Mind-boggling made-up science.
English
@dilanesper No kidding. You can spend your years involved in a lawsuit, or at a better job.
English
Essentially if you are victimized but generally well adjusted, you have massive incentives to just get on with your life and not relive things or take on a difficult to win claim. Which means a lot of true victims never sue.
English
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Yeats was concededly getting at something slightly different but the two concepts are related.
Wesley Yang@wesyang
It seems simultaneously true that you can secure a big payout for the most frivolous sexual and racial harassment claims and many meritorious claims are never made. The undeserving profit hugely while the deserving see no justice.
English
@KenGardner11 @GmailAkzurm @petespiliakos Do you believe that keeping the peace in Iran will be easier or harder than keeping the peace was in Iraq, and why do you believe it?
English
1. For the same reason supporters of the war won't level with the public about the downside costs and risks of following the war all the way through: Because support for the operation would evaporate.
Ken Gardner@KenGardner11
We have a once in a generation -- maybe once in a century -- opportunity to break what might very well be the worst terrorist regime on the planet. Why on earth do we continue to allow it to bargain for the terms of its continued survival.
English
@qu1nn_peaks @BethMacLel15392 @WallStRollup How do you know he doesn’t care about the people he employs?
English
@BethMacLel15392 @WallStRollup Sorry, what have I done to drive away businesses? Can you bots please stop reciting the same points that I didn’t reference or make? He is soulless because he only cares for vanity and doesn’t care about the people he employs, only how it looks to shareholders.
English
English
@1689Freeman @kittyraethomp Why would any self respecting British person buy lager is the real question here
English
Unfortunately there's a much more sobering trend when you look at median pay...
Owen Winter@OwenWntr
This is a fun idea. The average amount of time taken to earn a pint on minimum wage has actually fallen from 32 minutes in 1999 to 25 minutes in 2024
English
@SlopedPyramid Springsteen can't sing now either! He has no vocal talent!
English
this. it's actually not even close. Seger can sing, Springsteen can't
Super 70s Sports@Super70sSports
Bob Seger is better than Bruce Springsteen. I don’t know how many of you are joining me on this island but I feel like it will be 50% geniuses and 50% guys who make women instinctively lock their car doors.
English
@Tarnational @dilanesper And his first name is John, which is American for Onan.
English
now i am getting an inkling of why so many scary people are getting dangerously close in their assassination attempts. the secret service is literally jerking off.
Sheldon Fox-7 News@fox_sheldon
A US Secret Service officer was arrested for allegedly masturbating in a hotel hallway, following a woman and forcing her to retreat to her room for safety. Miami-Dade Deputies say they found Officer John A. Spillman pleasuring himself before his arrest. @wsvn #Exclusive
English
@dilanesper Yes, but they do like something like Obamacare, except that it was championed by Obama. It was specifically designed to appeal to conservatives. It was basically what Mitt Romney got passed as Gov of MA. They need more than a policy shop.
English
And obviously the left side does a lot of this and it works pretty well for us too. You may not like something like Obamacare but the notion of "this is how you use your control of government do something lasting" should register with you. And you do that by having a policy shop.
English
If there's one area where righties might actually listen to me when I criticize them it's this-- rebuild your policy shop. Politics is not all about owning the libs. Generate actual right wing ideas on things like housing policy.
You did this in the 1980's and it worked well.
English
@JamesSurowiecki Well I always have my accountant (and my lawyer) review my twitter post drafts before I post them, so Erick Erickson must be right.
English
The discussion of Kelsey Plum bizarrely claiming she would have to pay an extra $13,000 in taxes if she earned a dollar more from her LA Sparks contract has ended up being an interesting window into Twitter dynamics. In particular, it shows how people look for any reason to dunk on a point made by an account they dislike, even when they have no actual response to the point. It also how the desire for traffic trumps any kind of critical thinking.
Alex Berenson, for instance, tried to defend Plum by invoking NY state's tax laws, even though those laws are irrelevant to Plum's claim, since she lives in CA. And he attacked Plum's math (she's the one who said she would owe an extra $13,000) while blaming me for it. And he of course tossed in the obligatorily stupid reference to supposed midwits.
Erick Erickson, meanwhile, just waved his hands and said "Her accountants must have told her this, and they must be right," without ever offering an explanation of how $1 dollar in CA income could translate into $13,000 in new taxes.
This is just a silly way to argue. If you actually think a tweet is wrong, engage with the tweet itself and explain what's wrong with it. Don't, in your desperate desire to dunk, bring up red herrings or handwave and say "This can't be right," especially when doing so means you end up defending a ridiculous position.
English
@anishmoonka McCartney could have bought it in 1985 but thought the price was too high. So what is he complaining about?
English
In 1981, Paul McCartney showed his friend Michael Jackson a notebook of songs he had bought from other artists. They were earning him $40 million a year. Four years later, Jackson used that advice to buy 251 Beatles songs for $47.5 million.
He now owned Yesterday. Hey Jude. Let It Be. Strawberry Fields. Every hit Lennon and McCartney had ever written. McCartney could have bought them himself but thought the price was too high. Jackson didn't think so. McCartney later said about the deal: "To be someone's friend, and then buy the rug they're standing on."
The Beatles had lost their rights decades earlier, when Lennon and McCartney were barely out of their teens. In February 1963, John Lennon and Paul McCartney walked into a small house in Liverpool. John was 22. Paul was 20. A music publisher named Dick James handed them a contract. He told them it would set them up for life. They signed it without a lawyer in the room. They didn't read it. McCartney later called it a "slave contract."
The contract created a company called Northern Songs. Northern Songs would own every song Lennon and McCartney wrote together. Dick James and his business partner got 50% of the company. Lennon and McCartney each got 20%. Their manager Brian Epstein got 10%. George Harrison and Ringo Starr weren't part of the deal at all. The Beatles didn't own their own songs.
In 1965, Northern Songs went public to help the Beatles save on taxes. Their shares dropped to 15% each. In 1969, Dick James quietly sold his half of the company to a British media giant called ATV without telling the Beatles. Lennon found out from a newspaper headline while on his honeymoon with Yoko Ono. He called Paul in a panic. They tried to outbid ATV. They lost.
ATV is what Michael Jackson bought in 1985 for $47.5 million. He then sold half of it to Sony in 1995 for $95 million. Sony bought the other half from his estate in 2016 for $750 million. The catalog was worth more than a billion dollars by then.
In 2017, McCartney sued Sony. His lawyers had found a clause buried in an old American copyright law from 1976. It said songwriters could take back the rights to their old songs after 56 years. Sony settled out of court. On October 5, 2018, the rights to "Love Me Do" came back to McCartney. By 2026, every song he ever wrote with Lennon will be his again.
A 20-year-old signed a contract in 1963 without reading it. It took 56 years and an obscure American law for him to take it all back.
Michael Guy Bowman@mguybowman
the Beatles are a band where three guys have the world’s most normal names and one guy has a name you absolutely never hear and somehow he’s not even the main guy
English