The full lifecycle and text of this bill can be found here: https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/legislation/details/hb0732?ys=2020rs

First off: The digital advertising tax wasn't originally in the bill. Legislators co-opted a bill taxing tobacco products and added the digital ad language almost a month after the text was first introduced.

Second: There had been news reports that legislators were going to add language to prohibit pass-through of the tax to ad buyers. maryland.gov doesn't show any introduced amendment proposing that and that's not part of the final text. So based on the bill text, Google et al. could charge customers a "MD Digital Advertising Recovery Fee", unless there's a separate law prohibiting something like that. Directly passing a sliding-scale, revenue-based tax would be difficult unless a firm knew they were $100m+ in revenue.

Third: The text seems to force all companies that sell at least $1m of digital ads in the state to file paperwork (e.g. tax returns) even if they don't meet the gross revenue minimum of $100m. I'm thinking a medium-sized ad firm based in MD, does a few million annually in digital ads and they have $5m in total revenue. They don't owe tax but they still have to file supporting paperwork to show they don't owe for the digital tax. One would think this is the loophole, like Irish and Dutch-domiciled holding companies.

Absence of evidence is evidence? Show me an account balance statement with margin balances, funds available, buying power and we'll see how much this person had in settled funds and margin equity today. Most brokerages increased GME (among other tickers) to 100% maintenance in the last few days, and most customer agreements allow your broker to liquidate positions not only for margin calls but also for portfolio risk, and they can do it without your permission. If you don't understand what that means, you need to be in a cash account.

Adding on, it's not just that short sellers sometimes pop bubbles that need to be popped, they sometimes expose fraudulent companies. See Syntax-Brillian, a Nasdaq-listed U.S. manufacturer of TVs in the mid-2000s whose resellers included Best Buy and Costco and marketing partners included ESPN. The short sellers did channel checks and couldn't reconcile wholesale inventory reports with the 10-K/10-Q filings, and published their findings online. The company's auditor (EY) looked into it and eventually found the irregularities. Ultimately the shorts were proved right and were rewarded with a stock price that collapsed below $1 before going to zero in bankruptcy.

This story might already be out of date:

NYSE Mulls Reverting to Original Plan to Delist China Shares

Apparently NYSE made the reversal decision on their own last night. Mnuchin (Treasury Secretary) heard about it and called the NYSE President, Stacy Cunningham, to express the administration's displeasure with the reversal.

There were multiple journalists today running their sources and couldn't get a peep out of anyone about what was going on over at NYSE. Bloomberg's story is citing "three people familiar with the matter" which makes you wonder who leaked this turn in events...

But what would be the point of spending millions or billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars on real-time monitoring equipment like satellites and radar -- much of which is used to allow forecasters to warn the public of weather events like tornadoes -- if you can't disseminate the data to the public in real or near-real time?

And yes, NWS has its own forecasters who issue reports, but forecasting is subjective. Just look at this year's winter outlook published by the Washington Post: a 15-inch range in snowfall (low end: 7 inches; high end: 22 inches) across seven commercial forecasters. Many of those forecasters rely on the NWS data and don't have a viable alternative. Does it really make sense to lock the public out of a multi-million dollar data infrastructure over $1.5 million?

You're conflating three different sites:

• Weather.com, which is owned by IBM and is the website and app version of The Weather Channel (not the same thing as the TV channel)
• The Weather Group, which is owned by Entertainment Studios (Byron Allen's media company) and was formerly owned by Comcast/NBCUniversal/General Electric, and is the television version of The Weather Channel (not the same thing as weather.com and The Weather Channel app)
• National Weather Service, which is under NOAA and the U.S. Department of Commerce, which provides weather data to the public including the aforementioned corporations

The story is about NWS, aka weather.gov.

Likely a continuation of the "parcel scam" that started a few years ago and blanketed phone exchanges across specific regions in the U.S. with Mandarin-speaking populations. I got some on voicemail through 2018, went cold in 2019, and had a few show up this year again on voicemail.

Who reads the articles here...but the Verge article has the video embedded after the second paragraph. And the first link in the /. summary links to the NSF page on Arecibo which has the same video.

Not necessarily, the cool kids on Wall Street (mostly tech companies) use dual-class or multi-class shares that neuter activism by retail and institutional investors. Some of them, like Facebook and Google, grant additional votes to shares held by the founders and other close insiders -- for instance, 20 votes for an "insider" class of share vs. 1 vote for a regular share. A few recent companies flat out gave the middle finger and their common stock shares grant no votes -- IBD cites Snap (owner of Snapchat) and Blue Apron as two examples.

The Archivist of the United States is responsible for preserving Presidential records and normally they are held by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA): https://www.archives.gov/about/laws/presidential-records.html

Twitter is not responsible for preserving the tweets, they could delete them today if they wanted. Those on the hook would be the current Archivist, or members of the Executive Branch if they failed to preserve records and hand them off to the Archivist.

Recognizing that the story is about the TSE...in the US we have Reg SCI where the government requires exchanges to run periodic DR tests. We actually have one coming up on Oct 24.

Here's the catch: the most well-known exchange in the world, the New York Stock Exchange, doesn't actually run "true failover". NYSE operates two datacenters, one in New Jersey (Mahwah), the other in Illinois (Chicago/Cermak). When Mahwah is up, they block connections to Cermak, and vice-versa, so customers have to manually switch their trading systems' routing from one set of IPs to the other in coordination with NYSE. (They did this for real this past week -- the NYSE Chicago exchange ran out of Cermak for live trading, to give New Jersey the middle finger over a proposed financial transaction tax.) For all intents and purposes, if they had to flip to DR, the exchange would likely stay closed for the day to give customers a chance to switch over; trying to do this during the trading day would be messy.

Sure, TSE's issue looks bad because their failover failed. In reality they're no worse off than the gold-standard exchange (NYSE) which doesn't even have a failover.

Direct listing just means that the company believes it is well-capitalized, i.e. it doesn't need to raise money by issuing new shares. (See https://www.nyse.com/direct-listing.) The TechCrunch leak didn't disclose balance sheet details so we won't know how much cash is on hand until the S-1 is released, but it's a safe assumption that they have enough to do a direct listing and push a secondary offering into the future, if at all. Those complaints about existing investors and being a cash sink can equally apply to companies going public through the IPO process.

Each provider -- public and private -- has their own forecasting models and systems, that's what you're really "paying" for (either selling your :s/soul/data or purchasing/subscribing to the app for the private co's). See sources in my previous comment where TWS, WU, AccuWeather etc. have historically outperformed NWS forecast products.

The WaPo article is several years old but historically TWC has had the most accurate forecasts across the US compared to other providers.

There is also a site called ForecastAdvisor which shows provider accuracy down to the city/state level for the US using recent data. For instance, in the DC area, TWC was the most accurate for 2019, however AccuWeather was most accurate last month (July 2020).

For 2019 USPS recorded about $22.8b in package revenue, and about $43b on all other domestic shipping (first class, marketing, periodicals). That was a $1.3b increase yoy for package revenue; the other domestic categories all saw revenue drops. Overall their 2019 operating revenue was only up $500m yoy, most of that came from the increased shipping revenue. Source: https://about.usps.com/what/financials/10k-reports/fy2019.pdf

That being said: a) USPS cannot freely set pricing for most package services (they must justify increases and show that they meet certain legal criteria), and b) most of the increase in package volume comes from USPS's three biggest customers -- most likely FedEx, UPS, and Amazon, who use USPS for last-mile delivery. First Class letters/flats and similar services are price-capped to CPI-U and generally don't price by distance (55 cents for a 1oz letter whether it stays in the same ZIP Code or goes from Hawaii to Maine). In other words, their bottom line is very dependent on package revenue, because it's the only area they can meaningfully raise prices. Meanwhile UPS and FedEx are talking about adding per-parcel surcharges of up to $4 for high-volume shippers during the upcoming holiday season. By law USPS can't do that.