Very good point. Was trying to keep it simple. If I recall, the expected relocation costs are in the range of $6B for this spectrum.

Just because you can't believe it, doesn't mean it's not true. 65MHz, covering 315 million people. Spectrum's usually priced per MHz-POP (i.e. 10MHz of spectrum covering 1 million people is 10 million MHz-POPs).

There's a huge amount of variation in pricing, though. The most expensive license right now (on a MHz-POP basis) is for 10MHz covering the Chicago area (8.3M people) - $5.50 per MHz-POP. The most expensive license on an absolute basis is for 20MHz covering the NY Metro Area (27M people): $2 billion.

On the other hand, there are some licenses in rural Louisiana and South Dakota going for under $2k, or less than $0.01 per MHz-POP.

True, but in this case, the top bids, combined, are $34B. In other words, if the auction ended today, the government would receive $34 billion.

Hey, a deal's a deal. We didn't get Sun 2, the aliens don't get Europa as their private playground.

Walmart's cost of goods sold (i.e. the % of revenue that gets spent on the products they sell, doesn't include cost of labor, rent, light, etc.) is 75%, slightly above Amazon's 73%. So, WalMart is, on average, charging a SMALLER markup than Amazon.

Quite a number of states (Cali and Wisconsin come to mind) have laws prohibiting loss leaders, usually only if they're viewed as predatory pricing (i.e. trying to drive competitors out of business).

Wisconsin has a law that sets a minimum margin for gasoline. Idea is to prevent large operators with other revenue streams (i.e. a supermarket with a couple of gas pumps) from selling below cost to bring in shoppers, thereby driving out small operators

"they talk about people with amazon seller accounts creating sales in order to have them matched"

No, they're not creating "sales." They're creating sales pages they have no intention of actually delivering. Unless you think that the people pulling this scam would have happily shipped out hundreds of PS4s at $80 each, when the orders came in.

Oops, forgot link: http://www.dol.gov/minwage/cha...

The underlying data (through 2012) is here. Minimum wage (in 2012 $) peaked in 1968 at $10.34, has averaged (from 1938-2012) $7.09/hour in 2012 $.

In inflation-adjusted terms, the minimum wage was lower than current levels until 1956, above current levels from 1956 to 1984, and then mostly below current levels again since 1984 (with the exception of 1997-1998).

There's "gaming the system" and there's fraud. This isn't clipping Home Depot coupons and taking advantage of Lowe's willingness to accept competitor coupons. This is forging your own Home Depot coupons on your computer, printing them out, and using them at Lowe's, since you know that Home Depot won't accept the forgeries.

WalMart's already wised up, and changed the rules. Now it only applies to items on Amazon SOLD BY Amazon. No more marketplace sellers.

http://consumerist.com/2014/11...

They're not selling them on the exchanges precisely BECAUSE they want to avoid sharply pushing down the price of Bitcoin. $20M is about five days worth of volume on the USD/BTC exchanges. If you tried to dump that much volume into the exchanges, it would crush the price of Bitcoins vs. the US$.

Ignore my post, I've got this completely wrong. Oh, for an edit or delete button.

Who says the money isn't "real?" Bitcoin clearly do have value.

Essentially, they're just converting currencies. If they had seized a large pile of Yen, they could just convert it to US$, since there are highly liquid markets to do that. With Bitcoin, there isn't the liquidity to run a transaction of this size through any of the exchanges, so they're auctioning them off. Investors do similar things with stocks every day - if you're a mutual fund, and you want to sell 10k shares of AAPL (which trades about 50 million shares a day), you just sell it through an exchange. If you want to sell 10 MILLION shares, you probably negotiate a price with a major bank, since trying to dump that much stock on the open market will crush the price.