TheRanter

I read the manuals for the systems taking your money, then I translate them. The machine, the receipt, the move. Send me the one you're stuck in.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

FIFA didn’t ban scalping.
They made themselves the only place you’re allowed to sell your ticket, then took 15% from the seller and 15% from the buyer.
30% on a ticket they already sold you once.
They registered it as a charity.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

@CarbaughTEX @PoliceThePolic1 Show me a cop who turned other cops in and still has their job.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

https://t.co/BOumnRgqfX

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

@yaniFlor2020 @LuzF_32 @mattvanswol The right to question our leaders and our country are fundamental rights being an American. Saying love it or leave it is saying I should be denied my first amedment rights. Your trying too hard.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

@thisdiegolopez It is offside... no "s"

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

This map is median dollars paid, and that hides the part that matters most.
The University of Chicago study of 26 million sales found assessments run regressive almost everywhere. Within one county, homes in the bottom tenth by price get assessed at twice the rate, as a share of value, that top-tenth homes do. The lowest-value owner pays an effective rate more than double the mansion across town.
Chicago shifted about $2.2 billion in tax burden that way from 2011 to 2015, roughly $800 million of it off the top 10 percent of properties and onto the bottom 90. The over-assessment lands hardest on the people least able to appeal it.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

That $4,361 was a half-inch metal pin, about $46 to make, a 9,400 percent excess profit on one part. TransDigm is a public company, not PE, but it runs the PE playbook, buy up the sole-source parts makers, then hike the price.
The 2019 DoD IG audit found excess profit on 46 of the 47 parts it sampled, from 17 to 4,451 percent, and TransDigm refused to hand over cost data on 15 of 16 requests, because under the roughly $2 million threshold it legally doesn't have to.
The IG has flagged the same scheme across 23 years of reports. The issue is the cost-data exemption on sole-source buys. Close it and the pin costs $46.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

@RepOgles How about you go for a home run and make the pentagon pass an audit. Think how much fraud you could find there?

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

PJM's own market monitor, Monitoring Analytics, pinned 63 percent of last year's capacity price spike on data center demand. That's about $9.3 billion pushed onto ratepayers across the grid in one year.

Western Maryland households are eating around $18 a month from it, Ohio about $16, and roughly half of Pepco's $21 jump in D.C. traces to the same auction. This isn't a proxy for hating a chatbot. People opened the envelope.

This gets decided at the capacity auction, the FERC cost-allocation docket, and the state PUC, not on a listening tour. A bipartisan bloc of governors already went there and signed a deal to make the hyperscalers fund their own power instead of the household on the residential rate.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

Events and Attractions
Free for the USA opener, then $23.18 a head, $3.18 of that in fees. To charge for a plaza screening at all, McGregor Square had to get FIFA's legal department to approve it. The Monforts own the square. FIFA owns the right to let them charge for it.

[Sports Business Journal @SBJ]

Denver's McGregor Square is now charging $23.18 for World Cup watch parties after previously hosting them for free, citing crowd size and security.

Critics say it's a sign of what happens when businesses realize just how popular soccer has become.

Via @denverpost | https://t.co/FSnqhe5uCh

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

Average credit card APR is sitting around 22 to 24 percent, and a Truth Social post can't move it. A nationwide rate cap takes an act of Congress, and there's no federal usury law for a president to enforce, which is why he could call non-compliance illegal and nothing happened.
The one agency built to police card practices is the CFPB, and it's being cut to the studs at the same time. That promise needed a law or a working regulator. It got a tweet.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

@ReturnToLogicGA @BorrowerJustice @SenWarren This has nothing to do with caring about people. If your paying 24% interest then no you should not get the card.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

7-2, and the two dissenters were Gorsuch and Jackson, so this wasn't a left-right thing. Sotomayor and Kagan signed Kavanaugh's majority. The EPA never required a cancer warning on the Roundup label, so FIFRA preemption now blocks any state jury from second-guessing it.
Get the regulator to stay quiet and the courthouse door shuts on its own. And the fix you want from Congress already has a twin moving the other way.
A version of this same shield has been written into farm bill drafts. Bayer has paid over $10 billion in Roundup verdicts and settlements and calls this part of a multi-pronged strategy to contain the litigation. Those are their words.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

@SenMikeLee Heritage built a database to prove fraud is real. More than a thousand cases of every type over decades, against more than a billion ballots. The two the SAVE Act targets, noncitizen and impersonation, run about 40 and 10. Over 50 years and a billion cast votes.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

@RogerMarshallMD The SAVE Act treats voter fraud as a national emergency. Heritage built a database to prove it is real. Sorted by type, in-person impersonation: about ten cases in fifty years. That is the emergency. You are not fixing or saving anything.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

Doesn't matter what's on the sign. Fluffy Bunny, Tough Love Academy, Where Smart Kids Come From. Two ways the floor falls out, and they look nothing alike.

Door number one, the chain. Eight of the 11 biggest are private equity. The cash you pay walks out the back as rent to a landlord the owner happens to control. Somewhere on a server there is a beautiful training binder. Whether anyone walked the new hire through it before she clocked in, nobody can tell you.

Door number two, the lady down the street. No binder to ignore. One extracts the money. One never had a standard to begin with.

Your kid is in one of these rooms right now.

A lot of us worked at McDonald's. McDonald's makes you watch the videos. Food safety steps, the chemical chart stuck to the wall, a manager who signs off. Not because corporate has a heart, but because a sick customer is a lawsuit. We built a real floor under the fry station. We did not build one under the room where someone keeps eight toddlers alive.

Mom-and-pop or private equity, they pay her about the same, right around what the counter at McDonald's makes. Then they hand her the halo. You're not in it for the money, you're shaping young lives, it's a calling. That line is the most profitable thing in the building. It takes a wage too low to live on and reclassifies it as proof she's a good person. Ask for more and suddenly you're the one who doesn't care about kids.

So here is the move. Tomorrow, when you drop your kid off, ask the owner what they pay the person who actually watches your kid. Not what you pay. What she takes home. Then watch what happens. Do they answer? Or do they hesitate, waffle, tell you how much everyone here loves the children.

Because what you pay and what she makes are two very different numbers, and the distance between them is the whole business.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

AM General came into the contract carrying 675 million in buyout debt, which Moody's said in January 2023 left it with limited room to absorb setbacks. Weeks later the Army handed it the JLTV deal anyway.
Today about 2 billion is obligated to the company and the Pentagon has not accepted a single production-standard vehicle. The warning was on the record before anyone signed.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

The publish-the-prices experiment already ran. Hospitals have been federally required to post payer-specific negotiated prices since January 2021, and a 2024 PatientRightsAdvocate audit found only about a third of 2,000 hospitals fully compliant.
CMS started penalties at 300 dollars a day, so compliance stalled. Your 1 million a day is the teeth the original rule never had.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

Homeowners insurers paid out about 1.11 dollars for every premium dollar in 2023, so reinsurance costs spiked and carriers repriced the whole book across the country, not just in fire and storm zones. The worst risk then gets dumped onto state last-resort pools.

California's FAIR Plan hit a record 668,600 policies in late 2025 after the January wildfires, and just got an average 29 percent rate hike approved. You cover it in the premium or in the assessment.

[TheRanter @RanterMarkus]

The $653 million impact number for Kansas City's World Cup leaves one thing out: locals are not new money. A family swapping a Royals night for a FIFA night is the same dollars on a different night.
New money only arrives with out-of-town travelers, and their ticket goes to FIFA, their airfare goes to the airlines. What stays here is hotels and meals.
Run it honest and you get maybe $120 million in. The public put in close to $200 million. They spent more importing the crowd than the crowd brought.