Lotteries set aside about 40 percent of their ticket sales as state revenue that often goes to schools. Then, winners of more than $600 are subject to 45 percent windfall taxes on their good fortune. "The house" is winning, even when it’s losing. But it’s the poor who are really losing.
Last year FoodRepublic.com reported that a bottle of Rémy Martin Louis XIII Rare Cask cognac was $22,000. We estimate that about $5000 of that price is going into the packaging alone.
Coffee has long had a reputation as being unhealthy. But in almost every single respect that reputation is backward. The potential health benefits are surprisingly large, and there's more consensus on its benefits than you might think.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation say Roosevelt Champion III was found dead in a brushy area behind a home in the 600 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Authorities say the man does not live at the house where it happened.
The United States was slammed over its rights record Monday at the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, with member nations criticizing the country for police violence and racial discrimination, the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility and the continued use of the death penalty.
The previous owner was identified only as a “distinguished private European collection.” The painting was last sold in 1997 to tonight’s seller for $31.9 million—meaning it appreciated by $147.5 million in the past 18 years, for a compound annual growth rate of about 10%.
The Picasso’s purchase price bests a $142 million record set in 2013 for a Francis Bacon triptych. Separately during Monday’s auction, the Alberto Giacometti sculpture L’homme au doight fetched $141 million, making at the third most expensive artwork to be sold at auction. In 2012, hedge fund billionaire Leon Black paid $119.9 million for Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
The prices art commands at auctions has been skyrocketing in recent years, thanks in part to an influx of Asian buyers, particularly from China. But they’re also climbing fast because rich investors are viewing art as a safe place to park their cash amid a crackdown on Swiss banks.
Last week, a Chinese-speaking, hoodie-wearing mystery buyer paid over $66 million for a Vincent van Gogh painting, the most that artist’s work has ever fetched at auction.
my favourite Rosario Dawson story: she was at some award show (I think it was the MTV movie awards, but idk) and some dude was presenting, and he kept groping the women onstage. Like, he made a running gag out of groping every woman who came up to either present or accept an award. So finally Rosario got called up,and when she got onstage, she reached down and grabbed his balls like “OH, YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY? WHO’S LAUGHING NOW, ASSHOLE.”
and that was the end of that “running joke” and why I love Rosario Dawson. the end.
Small corrections and additions (from here and a few other sites):
Independent Spirit Awards 2011
The man was Paul Rudd (who’s been cast to be Ant Man, gross)
The groping was written into Rudd’s script. He was presenting Best Screenplay with Eva Mendes and the writers had the bright idea that him casually groping Mendes during the delivery would be funny? Not to pass the blame onto the writers - they may have written it but he carried it out.
Dawson was sitting at her table, holding her dinner fork and growing increasingly uncomfortable with the situation. When she made her decision to do something, she went onstage and first stabbed Rudd with the fork, and when he didn’t stop, she grabbed his crotch.
maker.me has a great piece on Shinola watches and their quest to prove that anything can be made in America.
Inside today’s factory, each Shinola timepiece is made by hand, including full assembly of the Argonite movements that power the watches. Shinola also designs and manufactures bicycles, leather goods, journals, and pet accessories. The company stands for skill at scale, works to preserve American craftsmanship, and celebrates the beauty of industry.
Director Jon M. Chu explains that, at its heart, the film is about young people trying to stay true to themselves while grappling with fame and fortune.
Today, for example, the world freaked out not over some big trailer leak or special announcement, but because someone put the words “Fallout 4” in their Linkedin profile.
No joke. All sorts of reputable gaming websites ranging from IGN to PCGamer rushed to report this news—that some poor, hopefully-not-fired artist at the Guillermo del Toro-helmed Mirada Studios had listed “Fallout 4 cinematic trailer” on their public Linkedin—because the world is just that desperate for morsels of information on this game.
Then, in a hilarious and Konami-like move, Mirada Studios started frantically e-mailing gaming websites and asking them to take down the news, which itself was the perfect confirmation that this is the real deal. What should be a non-story became one of today’s biggest events thanks to the Streisand Effect. (Nice job, Mirada.)
The US government's prosecution of a South Korean businessman accused of illegally selling technology used in aircraft and missiles to Iran was dealt a devastating blow by a federal judge. The judge ruled Friday that the authorities illegally seized the businessman's computer at Los Angeles International Airport as he was to board a flight home.
The authorities who were investigating Jae Shik Kim exercised the border exception rule that allows the authorities to seize and search goods and people—without court warrants—along the border and at airport international terminals. US District Court judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District of Columbia noted that the Supreme Court has never directly addressed the issue of warrantless computer searches at an international border crossing, but she ruled (PDF) the government used Kim's flight home as an illegal pretext to seize his computer. Authorities then shipped it 150 miles south to San Diego where the hard drive was copied and examined for weeks, but the judge said the initial seizure "surely cannot be justified."
After considering all of the facts and authorities set forth above, then, the Court finds, under the totality of the unique circumstances of this case, that the imaging and search of the entire contents of Kim’s laptop, aided by specialized forensic software, for a period of unlimited duration and an examination of unlimited scope, for the purpose of gathering evidence in a pre-existing investigation, was supported by so little suspicion of ongoing or imminent criminal activity, and was so invasive of Kim’s privacy and so disconnected from not only the considerations underlying the breadth of the government’s authority to search at the border, but also the border itself, that it was unreasonable.
The defendant was accused of unlawfully selling Q-Flex Accelerometers—models QA-2000-10, QA-2000-20, and QA-3000—manufactured by Honeywell Aerospace. They require an export license before they can be sold from within the US. Kim was accused of selling the technology to intermediaries in China and Korea before their ultimate destination of Iran.
With a month left before net neutrality complaints can be filed to the Federal Communications Commission, Internet service providers are continuing to sign agreements to prevent network congestion and a potential scolding from regulators.
The latest agreement was announced today between AT&T and Level 3, an Internet backbone operator that has accused broadband providers like AT&T of not upgrading interconnection points, allowing Internet performance for consumers to be degraded. A month ago, Level 3 told National Journal that it was "evaluating our options" and "still experiencing interconnection point congestion as some large consumer ISPs continue to attempt to leverage control over access to their users to extract arbitrary tolls."
While the FCC's net neutrality order bans paid prioritization of traffic after it enters providers' networks, it doesn't ban payments for interconnection, which happens at the edges of the network. However, the FCC set up a complaint process so it can decide whether particular demands are unreasonable and prod companies into providing enough capacity to prevent Internet slowdowns. Complaints can be filed beginning June 12.
'surely J.J. Abrams learned that there’s no room in a galaxy far, far away from horrible racial stereotypes. Surely. ...right?'
We recently found out that actress Lupita Nyong’o was using her considerable talents to play a all-new, motion-captured character for Star Wars: Episode VII. Now we may also know what that character looks like, too.
Super Opinionated.
