Empire City Casino (Yonkers) - 2021 All You Need to Know
Empire City Casino by MGM Resorts - Empire City Casino
empire casino events 2020
empire casino events 2020 - win
“The Canadian Epstein” — Disgraced fashion mogul Peter Nygard's own SON is helping police investigate his alleged sex crimes
Disgraced fashion mogul Peter Nygard's own SON is helping police investigate his alleged sex crimes By Guy Adams Investigates For The Daily Mail 15 Jan 2021 Link to article 'He has become my arch-nemesis. I no longer regard him as my father . . . He is a monster. I am now here to serve in any way I can, to support survivors and the justice process and also to help expose the people who covered up his crimes.' Kai Bickle's world came tumbling down one night in May 2019, when he attended a dinner party at a lavishly decorated mansion overlooking the golden sands of Venice Beach in Los Angeles. The host was his father, Peter Nygard, a Canadian fashion tycoon famed for the hedonistic lifestyle he pursued at a global portfolio of high-end properties, including vast residences in Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal, as well as New York, and, most notoriously, a Mayan-themed 'private luxury resort' in the Bahamas. Modelling himself on Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, the flamboyant Nygard, now 79, kept a revolving harem of girlfriends. Those caught up (often completely unwittingly) in this web had included actresses Susan Anton and Jennifer O'Neill, stripper-turned-reality star Anna Nicole Smith, and a former Wheel Of Fortune card turner by the name of Vanna White. His Caribbean parties, meanwhile, tended to attract a better class of A-lister. Past visitors to the island property had ranged from Jane Seymour and Bo Derek to Robert De Niro, , Michael Jackson and Joan Collins, not to mention and , who were photographed there in the early 2000s on an innocuous family holiday. The 2019 bash, during one of Peter's occasional business trips to LA, was to be a more down-to-earth affair. Roughly 20 guests, including Kai, 38, and his younger brother Jessar (one of roughly ten offspring Nygard has fathered via more than seven women) had been invited for food and drinks, followed by a late-night poker game. That was the plan, at least. But Kai never made it to the card- table. Instead, he fled the lavish premises in a state of distress, shortly after dinner, believing that he had just witnessed his father attempting to sexually assault an eight-year-old girl. Details of this ugly development are (it should be stressed) strongly disputed, and we shall examine them later. But the incident would kick-start an extraordinary chain of events that culminated just before Christmas, with the arrest of Peter Nygard on nine charges of sex trafficking and racketeering. Currently behind bars, with his $900 million (£660 million) business empire in tatters and the FBI poring over his computer hard-drives, the fallen tycoon has now been accused of rape or sexual assault by at least 57 women. Several of Nygard's accusers were children when the alleged crimes took place, and many claim they were drugged. At least 57 women have accused him. He will appear in court in Canada next week, seeking bail as he fights extradition to the USA. It is, perhaps, the most high-profile and shocking sex case since handcuffs were slapped on Jeffrey Epstein. And in a remarkable twist, it turns out that a leading figure in the increasingly public campaign to prosecute Mr Nygard is his aforementioned son, Kai. Upcoming documentary: ‘Unseamly’ Canadian Designer Peter Nygård True Crime Documentary Behind the scenes, I can reveal that Kai has spent the past 18 months secretly helping both the U.S. and Canadian authorities investigate his own father's alleged crimes. Keeping his role hidden from Nygard and his associates for several months, he has worked tirelessly to assist victims, and their legal teams. On the personal front, he has changed his name (taking up his mother's surname to become Kai Zen Bickle) and used his influence over various Nygard companies to block efforts to move his assets offshore, fearing that would allow him to flee. 'We have been engaged in a brutal battle against my father and his enablers,' is how Kai summed things up when we spoke this week. 'He has become my arch-nemesis. I no longer regard him as my father . . . He is a monster. I am now here to serve in any way I can, to support survivors and the justice process and also to help expose the people who covered up his crimes.' Perhaps most remarkably of all, Kai recently helped two of his younger siblings, one of whom remains a minor, to sue Peter Nygard over claims he 'engineered' the rape of his own sons. In an extraordinary lawsuit filed in August, the boys claimed that their leathery, multi-millionaire father instructed one of his long-standing girlfriends (who was also a sex worker) to 'make a man' out of them. The first of these alleged attacks (which, again, are vehemently denied by Nygard) took place in the Bahamas 2004, when the son was 15 and the woman was in her mid-20s. The second occurred in Winnipeg in 2018, when the younger child was 14 and the woman was in her 40s. Court papers filed by the boys stated that the unnamed girlfriend was instructed to seduce Nygard's son by showering in his bathroom so that he 'could see her naked'. Then she raped him. Afterwards, she allegedly told the boy he 'wasn't bad' for a 'baby.' The next morning, Nygard's girlfriend brought him breakfast in bed, kissing him on the lips and announcing: 'Mommy's got you.' Kai says he first became aware of this appalling incident last spring, and was 'sickened' to hear his brothers' claims. He would often yell and scream at his staff. 'We all spoke and decided the best course of action was to file a lawsuit publicly in the hope that other survivors would feel safe to come forward and also file criminally against Nygard,' he says. 'We were originally going to have me in the suit as my young brother's guardian, but in the end decided not to because it would reveal to Nygard that I was working against him . . . At the time I was [secretly] doing everything I could to improve the odds that he would get arrested.' To appreciate the extraordinary journey taken by Kai, we must wind the clock back to the mid-1980s, when his father was one of Canada's most talked-about self-made millionaires. The son of penniless immigrants from Finland, Peter Nygard had launched his empire in the late 1960s, with an $8,000 (£6,000) investment in a struggling fashion firm. By the time he was 30, the company had become one of North America's most successful suppliers of leisure and sportswear, while his flamboyant eccentricities, which included keeping parrots in his office and filling the lobby of Nygard HQ with bronze busts of himself, turned him into an object of public fascination. In 1987, the party-loving entrepreneur purchased a 4.5-acre patch of the island of New Providence in the Bahamas and set about turning it into a 'dream home' where he could indulge his champagne lifestyle. Over the ensuing years, he built 150,000 sq ft of Mayan-themed buildings, stretching over a dozen 'cabana-style' residences. The buildings at Nygard Cay eventually included a casino, a disco hut (with cameras beneath the dance floor, reportedly to shoot images of revellers from below), and the world's largest sauna, a 6,000 sq ft lodge made from 2ft-thick Canadian pine logs. In the grounds were fake volcanoes that belched dry ice, a flock of peacocks, stone cobras which hissed steam at sunset, 60 ft towers festooned with hundreds of flaming torches (lit nightly by staff) and giant statues of nude women, purportedly modelled on some of Nygard's favourite girlfriends. At weekends, he would host lavish parties, which appeared on various TV documentaries, including Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous. The place became a magnet for freeloading celebrities and, while Kai believes they generally had the most fleeting and brief relationship with Nygard, photos of their visits were then plastered across company literature and websites. Prince Andrew, to cite one example, was recorded for posterity wandering with the long-haired fashion magnate on the beach, wearing blue shorts and boat shoes. Born in the 1980s, Kai spent the first three years of his life in the Bahamas until his mother, Patricia, left Nygard, with whom she'd had three children but never married. They moved first to California and then to the Pacific Northwest in the U.S. Over subsequent years, he had almost no regular contact with the fashion tycoon aside from occasional visits during school holidays, where he met various half-siblings. 'He would have one family weekend per year at his lake cottage, and a few days set aside for Christmas,' says Kai of the somewhat unorthodox arrangement. 'During those times, the days were filled with activities like horseback riding or mini golf. 'He could be a very charismatic person when he wanted to be and the family weekends were very light and brief.' In the very limited time he spent with his father during childhood, Kai saw nothing that gave him reason to suspect that Peter Nygard was guilty of criminality, though he did have a highly volatile personality. 'He would yell and scream at his staff often, and that always was upsetting to everyone around it, but he would describe his yelling as 'passion' because of his 'high standards',' Kai says. Nygard's children were further told that he 'lived a consensual, non-monogamous lifestyle,' Kai says. 'He made speeches at dinner to family when we were together to talk about how he hoped everyone got a wonderful partner and wished that he could find that special someone, but that it wasn't the life for him. 'He also had girlfriends that were persistently with him, always two or three, and often they were around for years. He wasn't embarrassed about it. He flaunted it on TV, it was part of his brand, something he showed the whole world. He was proud of it.' Be that as it may, rumours of predatory behaviour by Nygard —and worse — had occasionally reared their ugly head, only to be quickly suppressed: a relatively easy task before the internet. In 1980, for example, he was charged with the rape of an 18-year-old, but the charge was dropped when the complainant refused to testify. In 1996, three female employees meanwhile filed sexual harassment complaints in the Canadian province of Manitoba. It looked like his hand was on her thigh, rubbing. One, a 39-year-old communications manager, said that, when called into Nygard's office, she would 'find him in a state of undress . . . with his hands down the front of his pants, fondling himself.' He settled by giving the women $18,500 (£13,600) and denied any wrongdoing. Then, in 2010, a Canadian TV network put out a Panorama-style documentary about Nygard, focusing on alleged sex abuse and harassment of former employees. It quoted a former stewardess on his private plane who alleged that on one journey — during which Nygard was accompanied by a troupe of topless women — he lost his temper with staff, shouting: 'You are nothing! You are garbage! I am God!' The programme also alleged that Nygard had engaged in 'inappropriate sexual contact' with a young woman who had been brought to his home in 2003 from the Dominican Republic. Nygard denied that either incident had happened, and sued to stop the documentary being broadcast. Fast forward to May 2019, however, and those ugly incidents were largely forgotten. Kai, who was by then in his late 30s, had worked for his father's companies for just over two years after leaving college, but quit to pursue a career in activism and health science. Nygard's trip to Los Angeles afforded them a rare opportunity to catch up, so he attended the aforementioned dinner party in Venice Beach. As the night wore on, he recalls becoming uncomfortable about his father's behaviour towards an eight-year-old girl, who was attending with her mother, one of Nygard's old girlfriends. 'He's got her sitting right next to him at dinner, which is usually his girlfriend chair. And he's a creature of routine. So I'm already thinking this is weird. 'He's trying to act like the Papa. It was just weird . . . I'm noticing things. I'm noticing that he's telling her little secrets at dinner. Putting his hand close to her ear and going all hush-hush.' At the end of dinner, most of the other 20-odd guests got up to adjourn to the card table. However, Kai adds: 'I'm still watching him. Her chair gets pushed back. He brings her round to him. 'She was on his right side. He brings her to his left side, with his arm around her waist, and I see his elbow change and start moving as if — it looked to me, I couldn't see, but it looked like his hand was on her upper thigh, and rubbing. That's what it looked like to me . . . Everything in my body told me he was doing something terrible.' 'I had a huge adrenaline rush and I immediately told the mother to get her daughter away from him,' he adds. 'I stood up next to him and looked in his eyes. At that moment, for me, it was like all the walls were crashing down around him . . . And I realised that, yeah, he's probably trying to groom that girl.' Nygard vigorously denied wrongdoing, and even called Kai 'sick' for thinking as much. But Kai was unconvinced. Then, in February last year, ten women filed a bombshell lawsuit in New York claiming that the fashion magnate had used wealth and status to 'entice underage girls' from 'young, impressionable and often impoverished backgrounds' into his home, where they would be 'plied with alcohol' and (some allege) date-rape drugs, before being taken to Nygard's private quarters, where he would 'assault, rape and sodomise' them. Court papers claimed they were then coerced into joining a globe-trotting harem of sex workers paid thousands of dollars from Nygard's company funds and trafficked around the world on his company's private jet, which reportedly boasts a stripper pole. One alleged victim, who was just 14 at the time, claimed Nygard raped her and paid her $5,000 (£3,700). Another said her encounter with Nygard began with him showing her pornography after which he raped her, 'causing her extraordinary trauma and pain', the suit states. Three of his existing ten accusers were 14 at the time. Three more were 15. Within days, dozens more alleged victims had come forward. By the summer, some 57 survivors were pursuing legal action — and the number of alleged victims had reached 100. Kai again confronted his father, only to be told it was all 'lies' and asked to speak out publicly in his father's support. But days later a friend texted Kai to complain about a recent visit to Nygard's house in Los Angeles. 'He said he'd brought a female friend with him, who had one or two drinks and had started to feel very high. Nygard took her up to his room and aggressively had sex with her, not using a condom. 'When I heard that, I knew he was not only as bad as people said he was, but was a dangerous criminal and had to be stopped.' He duly alerted the authorities about the friend's message. In a podcast called Live To Walk Again, released this week, he revealed that he began helping both the police and the alleged victims' lawyers, who he regards as 'heroes'. Over the summer, Kai also used official positions held in Nygard firms to block two apparent efforts to move assets overseas, amid concerns that the tycoon might flee to evade justice. PODCAST EPISODE: Peter Nygard Discusses His Father 'Through the course of ten months I also helped several survivors to file criminally against him, and spent countless hours on the phone with survivors, lawyers and authorities,' he says. Last month Nygard was arrested on U.S. charges at a home in the Royalwood area of Winnipeg. He spent Christmas behind bars and has consistently denied any wrongdoing, saying he 'expects to be vindicated' in court. Kai has renounced his inheritance and is working on 'making the world a better place' by campaigning to close legal loopholes exploited by sex offenders. 'I'm very happy earning my own money, as I have all my life. We've never had a trust fund or an allowance, and since his money has been made through pain and suffering, I won't accept a potential inheritance,' he says. His father's cash, he says, should instead go towards compensating victims. 'My focus now is to help the healing process.'
WARNING:It is up to you to judge the accuracy and veracity of the below before trading. I take no responsibility for the accuracy of the information in this thread.
Your Pre Market Brief for Tuesday December 15th 2020
Brought to you byMoonGangCapital You can subscribe to the daily 4:00 AM Pre Market Brief on The Twitter Link Here . Alerts in the tweets will direct you to the daily 4:00 AM Pre Market Brief in this sub. Other Useful Resources:The Ultimate Quick Resource For the Amateur Trader. Published2:33AMEST / Updated as of4:00 AMEST -----------------------------------------------
Overnight News Heading into Tuesday December 15th 2020
(News Yet to be Traded 8:00 PM - 4:00 AM EST) It is up to you to judge the accuracy and veracity of the below before trading. I take no responsibility for the accuracy of the information in this thread.
TSLA Tesla To See $1.1B In 'Deferred Software Revenue' In 2021, Munster Estimates
TSLA Elon Musk's SpaceX Seeks To Double Valuation At $92B In New Funding Round: Report
TSEM Tower Semiconductor and OPIX Announce the Successful Development of a World Class iToF Technology Platform for 3D Imaging and Face Recognition Applications
AAPL Apple Supplier's iPhone Factory Suffers $7M In Damages During Violent Worker Protests
EAF GrafTech Announces Upsizing and Pricing of Secondary Offering of Common Stock by Existing Stockholders
ATA.U Americas Technology Acquisition CORP. Announces Pricing of $100 M IPO
UBER Uber Fined $59M In California Over Refusal To Share Information On Sexual Assaults
BNR Burning Rock Announces an Exclusive in-Licensing of a Risk Stratification Test for Early Stage Lung-Cancer Patients from Oncocyte in China
BCDA ($4.48) BioCardia, Inc. Announces $8.5 Million Registered Direct Offering Priced At-The-Market Under Nasdaq Rules [Revised]
UBER DASH LYFT GRUB Uber and DoorDash are hiking food delivery and rideshare prices for Californians to pay for new driver benefits
WBA CVS COST RAD KR COVID-19 vaccines expected by spring 2021 at drugstore/grocery store
GOOG GOOGL Google Kills Its Google Home Max Smart Speaker Line
J Jacobs Secures Place on Irish Water's Engineering Design Services Framework
End of Day and After Hours News Heading into Monday December 15th 2020
(News Traded 4:00 PM - 8:00 PM EST) It is up to you to judge the accuracy and veracity of the below before trading. I take no responsibility for the accuracy of the information in this thread.
WM Waste Management Announces Plan to Increase its Quarterly Dividend Rate and a Refreshed Share Repurchase Authorization
CAH Ohio Chooses Cardinal Health for COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution
PTON Spinning creator files patent infringement lawsuit accusing Peloton of stealing its technology for their stationary bikes
EYRP ERYTECH Completes Enrollment in TRYbeCA-1 Phase 3 Trial in Second-Line Pancreatic Cancer
XOM North Dakota Sees Its One-Time Oil Gushers Stalled Until 2022
DIS The Walt Disney Company Schedules Annual Meeting of Shareholders for March 9, 2021
BSX NVRO Boston Scientific Announces Stipulation Of Dismissal Of Nevro Corporation's Patent Infringement Case In California
HON Honeywell Acquires Sine Group To Create A Mobile Platform For Honeywell Forge Offerings And To Enhance Connected Buildings Solutions
NOC Northrop Grumman secures two Air Force contracts worth $185.7M and ~$163.65M
WD Walker & Dunlop Structures $86 Million in Financing for Seniors Housing Properties
MMP Kherkher Garcia, LLP Files Suit on Behalf of Burn Victims in Magellan Oil Tank Explosion
PRIM Primoris Services acquires Future Infrastructure Holdings for $620M
PEO ADX Adams Natural Resources Fund Initiates Share Repurchases Pursuant To Enhanced Discount Management And Liquidity Program
TBI PeopleReady’s JobStack App Recognized for Tech Excellence in Staffing During Pandemic
XOM Engine No. 1 Comments on ExxonMobil’s New Emissions Targets
NHS Neuberger Berman High Yield Strategies Fund Announces Final Results of Its Tender Offer and Reduction in Leverage
SAIC NOC US Department of Defense awards new contracts to NOC / SAIC
GDYN Grid Dynamics Acquires Netherlands-based Daxx, Expands Footprint in Western Europe
MTN Vail Resorts, Inc. Announces Commencement of $500,000,000 Convertible Senior Notes Offering
DCI Donaldson Company Makes Strategic Investment With Key Appointment to Accelerate Growth in Life Sciences
VGC ($0.98) Vista Gold Drilling Confirms Adjacent Mineralized Zone at the Mt Todd Gold Project
ARMS ($3.26) On July 24, 2020, Amyris and the members of our board of directors were named as defendants in a putative stockholder class action filed in the Court of Chancery of the State of Delawa..
PQG PQG +9.4%, materials segment acquired by The Jordan Company affiliate
HWKN Hawkins Named One of America’s Most Responsible Companies by Newsweek
NXPI NXP Semiconductors shares fall after Goldman downgrade on lack of upside
TOL: Poor guidance and headwinds in the real estate market (Reliable company though)
LEN: Dipping as a result of TOLL's guidance. Posturing for earnings on the 16th
SPWH: Dropping as analysts expect a decrease in revenue earned next year.
ITB: Real estate expected to cool off in the winter before popping again in the Spring
LMT: Typical post dividend dip
CRM: Dipping because investors assess they paid too much for the Slack purchase
KMX: Been trading sideways for nearly 6 months. Earnings on 12/22
BGFV: Post earnings/dividend dip
VIVO: Volatile growth stock
WM: Dumping after dividend. News Above: Resuming share repurchase program and upping dividend
WERN Missed in Revenue last ER. Looks oversold.
Offering News:
MIRM Mirum Pharmaceuticals Announces Pricing of Public Offering of Common Stock
CTAQ Carney Technology Acquisition Corp. II Announces Closing of $402,500,000 Initial Public Offering
TGTX TG Therapeutics Announces Pricing of Upsized Public Offering of Common Stock
MUDS Mudrick Capital Acquisition Corporation II Announces Closing of Underwriter’s Option to Purchase Additional Units in Connection with its Initial Public Offering
TPVG TriplePoint Venture Growth BDC Corp. Announces Extension and Expansion of Its Revolving Credit Facility
AROC Archrock Announces Upsizing and Pricing of $300 Million of Senior Notes
CSTL Castle Biosciences Announces Commencement of Proposed Public Offering of Common Stock
LEAF Leaf Group Announces Closing of Public Offering of Common Stock
OCUL Ocular Therapeutix to raise $75M in stock offering
ENLC EnLink Midstream Announces Pricing of $500 Million of Senior Notes Due 2028
PXLW Pixelworks Announces Closing of $12.0 Million Public Offering of Common Stock
HYFM Hydrofarm Holdings Group Announces Closing of Initial Public Offering and Full Exercise of Underwriters’ Option to Purchase Additional Shares
Commodities:
Oil Edges Toward $47 Ahead of U.S. Coronavirus Vaccine Rollout
----------------------------------------------- Subscribe to This Brief and the daily 4:00 AM Pre Market Brief on The Twitter Link Here . Alerts in the tweets will direct you to the daily brief in this sub Other Useful Resources:Stock Market Tools, Resources, Advice, & Tutorials WARNING: It is up to you to judge the accuracy and veracity of the above before trading. I take no responsibility for the accuracy of the information in this thread.
Disclaimer: I am a trainee chartered accountant who works in large tax firm. My specialty is a very specific area of corporation tax; I do not prepare tax returns in my job, and I don't work with personal tax. I live and work in the European Union, but the tax issues are high-level principles, and in general I think the conclusions aren't really affected by the specificities of the US tax code. Nothing in this post should be taken as tax or legal advice in any context. I wanted to try and put down some thoughts on the Trump tax return revelations in order to achieve some kind of catharsis in the face of what I think is a lot of misinformation and misunderstandings. I'll include headings for each issue on my mind and hopefully people can either gain some insight or engage with me to help me to understand better. Tax Planning, Avoidance and Evasion First, let me explain with examples what each of these terms refer to. Tax Planning is the use of tax incentives to minimize a tax bill which are contemplated by the drafter of the tax code. An example is a scheme that would allow you to pay your gym membership using your pre-tax pay: when you pay the sum out of the gross amount, you won't suffer tax on the amount paid, and as such you will pay less tax. The idea is that by incentivising the population to spend on a certain outcome, the benefits of the outcome (healthier people) will be more efficient for the system as a whole (healthcare or mental health or whatever).1 Tax Avoidance is the implementation of aggressive or inventive tax structures in order to reduce a tax bill in a manner which is either legal or illegal, characterised by the lack of contemplation on the part of the drafter of the tax code. In other words, it means you are finding a "tax loophole" that doesn't necessarily generate value otherwise for the state and taking advantage of it to reduce your tax bill. A famous example of this is the "Dutch Sandwich": large corporations took advantage of the relationship between different international treaties in order to shift profits to a low tax jurisdiction such as Bermuda.2 Tax Evasion is illegal tax avoidance. Let's say you rent a property and ask your tenant to pay you in cash. You then do not declare this cash as rental income, thus avoiding having to pay tax on your rental income. This is illegal because you haven't presented a fair and true set of information of your taxable income/expenses for the tax year, so you are evading the payment of tax. You could, for example, claim a tax refund to which you are not entitled.3 With regard to Trump, tax avoidance alone with respect to his personal affairs should constitute a black mark on his record as a public servant. It ought to be a huge scandal that a politician avoided tax, no matter how elusive and clever the scheme, because tax avoidance results in a deficit in the year's tax revenues that has to be made up for by the taxes paid by the public. If even a comedian has enough shame to apologise and roll back his tax avoidance arrangements, a presidential candidate should do it in a heartbeat.4 Carry-forward Losses Carry-forward losses are a technically complicated area of taxation, and I am not at all privy to the rules in the US. This doesn't matter though, because in principle the implementation is extremely understable. It means that when you have a business venture, and you make a loss in a given year, you can use that loss in future years to avoid paying tax on the profits. Let's take a super short example: Let's say I have income in Year 1 of 100 and expenses of 120, so I make a loss of 20. I don't pay tax on my loss. Let's say I have income in Year 2 of 100 and expenses of 80, so I make a profit of 20. The previous year's loss cancels out my profit this year, and I don't pay any tax. The result is that you consider the entire business venture in its entirety, because it would be unfair (and unproductive) to force a business to suffer tax on its profitable years but to ignore the years it made a loss. For me, carry-forward losses do not come close to avoiding a tax burden for 11 of 18 years, as per the NYT article. Perhaps the layout of his taxes paid is bizarre (he could have had a huge tax bill in a single year which means the lack of tax paid in the other years is explained). The reason that this is telling is in the opening paragraphs of the NYT article:5
He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
"Largely because he reported losing much more money than he made." This is the idea you have to grip in your head: if Trump were an investment machine, you would put a dollar in and get back 30 cents. These facts outline the financial profile of a business operative whose extreme incompetence and lack of self control has resulted in losses for the shareholders of the businesses for which he is responsible. A capable member of management has literally one job: make money for the company's shareholders, and it is clear that in the aggregate Trump has not been able to succeed in doing this. The article outlines further that the only area in which Trump was successful was in his capacity as a performer in the context of shows like The Apprentice6 or ads for Oreos7 or Domino's pizza.8 His only successful venture is playing the part of a caricature of the businessman he pretends to be in his professional life, whereas in reality he was a total failure. Trump's only successful business investments are companies in which he did not perform a management role: those where he invested capital and the business was ran by someone else. Quick Fire TL:DR Round
The bulky tax refund that Trump used to reduce the majority of his tax bill is the subject of an audit by the IRS. I don't know anything about this audit, and you don't either.
Trump has personally guaranteed loans (I have never encountered this and it is an immensely foolish thing to do in any business context).
Trump has large amounts of concerning debt, the principal (the amount he originally borrowed and has to pay back) is coming due in his second term.
Trump has deducted questionable expenses against his taxable income (either for avoidance or embarrassment reasons), such as certain residences, aircraft and the $70,000 in hair styling.
Something really interesting: the Trump Organisation has paid Ivanka Trump as a consultant in a manner which reduced the family's overall tax bill. This is a red flag for auditors, as the sum paid could be engineered to reduce their taxable income as the parties involved in the transaction are related.
Not even close. Again, Amazon was a company with negative net income and worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Is that also a failed business? Amazon and Trump seem to be employing the same strategy - using their free cash flow to maximize future earning potential. All Trump's tax returns tell us is that he is trying to "maximize present value of future cash flows" - exactly what Amazon does.
This is intensely misleading and doesn't take into account the stark differences between Trump's area of operations and Amazon. Moreover, the correct comparison isn't the entity Amazon, it's Bezos, and the taxes he paid as the leader of a large & successful conglomerate over the course of 11 years or so. In certain industries, it's common to sustain heavy losses in early operational years in order to prepare for years when you expect your business venture to generate revenues. Take a pharmaceutical company: during the years when you are researching and developing your drug, you can't sell it, so you make losses on that specific venture: but when you finally start to actually get people paying for your product, you can often command a price high enough to recuperate whatever losses you made. In the case of Amazon, Jeff Bezos devoted the company's strategy to building a robust and near-monopolistic infrastructure where Amazon inhabits so many areas of consumers' lives that they turn to it without thinking for everyday products, subscriptions etc. The question I would love to grill this commenter on is super simple: when your businesses are casinos, golf courses and hotels, what exactly is the event or change you are expecting to take place in the future that will suddenly "maximise your future cash flows"? What is the future investment that Trump's ventures are sustaining net losses on that are going to be profitable in the future? Why are Trump's competitors in these sectors generally able to run their businesses with enough alacrity to generate a profit? If Trump were an able businessman, there is no reason he shouldn't be able to run these businesses successfully. Questions If anybody is curious about anything above and wants to discuss it, or just ask me to explain/give my impressions on any of this stuff, feel free to ask and if I think I understand it it would be fun to discuss. For anyone who understands the US tax system better than I do: one issue I can't wrap my head around at all is how people keep talking about "depreciation" in the context of these revelations. If you think you understand it, can you explain to me how Trump or others think depreciation has anything to do with the information revealed in the NYT article? Depreciation, as a rule, shouldn't affect taxable income because it's an accounting entry and not a deductible/relevant tax expense. 1https://www.unionen.se/rad-och-stod/friskvardsbidrag-fran-arbetsgivaren, for example. 2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich. 3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Snipes#Income_tax_conviction. 4https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carr#2012_tax_avoidance_controversy. 5https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html. 6https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/29/trump-tax-returns-the-apprentice-empire. 7https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIRtruagdPc. 8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouG9cVhjPds; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEROWjPdCNU. 9 The use of this phrase in this context is total nonsense. "Net present value" is an investment evaluation technique that takes into account the time value of money for future investment flows. What the commenter means, I think, is effective working capital management: based on the facts in the article, Trump is an atrocious working capital steward as the losses he sustains through his businesses will have to be supplemented with additional capital in the business, either from his own pocket or shareholders he can convince to invest.
If Hollywood wants to make a BioShock movie, then they should hire Martin Scorsese to adapt BioShock: Rapture novel
Whenever I see someone asking for a BioShock film, they seem to want a direct adaptation of the first game's narrative. Well, in 2007, 2K tapped Pirates Of The Caribbean director, Gore Verbinski, to make a live-action BioShock movie. It went through many troubles like budget concerns, rating, and plot. Apparently, the script was supposed to be faithful to the game, and it is easy to understand why it ended up not working. The problem is with Verbinski's vision for the BioShock film is that the first BioShock's narrative cannot be made into a movie because it is fundamentally a story about the player agency, something that can only be done in a video game. Adapting the same story in the non-interactive medium either reduces the impact or misses the point of the Would You Kindly twist, which works in a medium where you take an active part in. It falls apart when this carries to the passive medium. This is not to mention most of the story is told through the silent character listening to audio logs of worldbuilding and monologues we never meet, isolated encounters with characters, constant firefights, and the environmental storytelling. How can you fit what is essentially a 12-hour story designed for a video game into a conventional 2-hour film? It would require major omissions and rewrites that would make the story unrecognizable. A direct adaptation is a bad idea. Instead, a spin-off story taking place in Rapture with ideas discussed in the game could work since Rapture is one of the best-realized game worlds ever created. If you want to make a BioShock movie that stars Rapture, then they should not look to the first game, but the spin-off novel, BioShock: Rapture by John Shirley. This novel is considered one of the best game tie-in novels. Set before the original game, Rapture follows Andrew Ryan's journey to create his utopia, covering the events during the birth and the fall of Rapture. Familiar characters and themes from the BioShock universe are expanded upon in the story. What makes it the best candidate for the adaptation is this can perfectly work as an introduction to Bioshock because it is a separate standalone story from the games. This is about Andrew Ryan, a backstory for the game rather than the game's plot events. It also helps that this would require a relatively lower budget to create in comparison to adapting the first game as it would be about a character-piece rather than an action blockbuster. It breaks the video game movie stereotype like Resident Evil and Tomb Raider. This might sound odd, but Martin Scorsese would be a great fit. Scorsese's films often revolve around the larger than life biopic of the rise and fall of a man within the tides of history he cannot control, often about building their own empire and fame, but ends in the bittersweet note. Goodfellas, The Aviator, Gangs of New York, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman, Raging Bull, Casino, Hugo all follow the suit. Think of The Aviator style 3-hour epic biopic of Andrew Ryan, starring Tom Hanks or John Slattery. It would work as a reversed Atlas Shrugged, kind of countering Zack Snyder's Fountainhead that will set to be released. EDIT: In retrospect, I probably should have picked younger directors like Todd Phillips, Adam Mckay, Bong Joon-ho, and John Lee Hancock than Scorsese.
One Good Investment Can Allow You Never to Work a Normal Job Again
I made a big investment several years ago. It was one I didn’t take lightly. I bothered to do enormous amounts of research. What made it hard was there was a taboo nature attached to my investment choice. Buying any form of internet money was considered wildly stupid, irresponsible, and making an unnecessary bet. My focus wasn’t on the investment though. It was on the problem being solved. Sending money around the internet wasn’t easy. When I had to pay friends in other countries it was a giant pain in the ass. The internet made everything easier, except the world of finance which I worked in. Dinosaur organizations with mainframes from the 80s dominated. They used their green screens to send money all over the world. I thought to myself there must be a better way. The 2008 financial crisis was not kind to me. I nearly lost everything in a matter of weeks. As a punk 20 year old with a drivers license, I had no idea about the tsunami that came fast. The local government gave out stimulus checks. I remember getting $900 for free and thinking something’s not right here. I took the money and spent it like a good boy (or did I save it — can’t remember). This event in human history taught me to question money and financial markets. A mentor of mine forced me to read books written by investing legends like Warren Buffett.One Good Investment Can Allow You Never to Work a Normal Job Again Investing was clearly a mental game. Around the same time, in a computer lab somewhere in the world, a man named Satoshi was writing code. His little project was nothing new. It used cryptography which had been used many times before. Internet money wasn’t a new concept. Everybody tried to create digital money. What profit-seeking corporation wouldn’t want to have its own money? Satoshi wasn’t doing it for profit. The clue to Satoshi’s dream lied in the first block that was mined on the blockchain technology he invented. It read “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” Clearly Satoshi saw a problem. Unlike most of the world’s population he was idealistic enough to think he could fix the problem. Bailouts for banks pissed Satoshi off. Why? Bailouts meant money printing. Money printing by governments leads to companies that should go bankrupt getting saved, stimulus checks and reckless fiscal policy. Creating money out of thin air meant the rich got access to the money first, while poor people were left out in the cold. Money printing caused, and still causes, inequality amongst humans. This frustration of inequality led to the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The people of America were the first to break. They had enough of investment banks treating financial markets like a casino. Their protests went nowhere, unfortunately. The banks got bailed out because that was the only option. Satoshi’s blockchain invention operated behind closed doors. A few, known as the Cypherpunks, experimented with the currency for the internet he created. It was an interesting experiment. Nobody thought it would go anywhere. Several years later I came across Satoshi’s experiment. It seemed like a noble cause but there was just no way governments would let his invention succeed. Satoshi was two steps ahead. He hid his identity and made his blockchain something that could never be shut down. To shut down his creation meant shutting down the internet. Governments tried to ban his invention though. China was the first. They thought they succeeded. Then its citizens decided to move trading digital currencies to “over the counter.” (This term means transacting face to face in a public place or secure office.) The dream was to have money be borderless. All you needed was to remember your 12-word passcode and you could go anywhere in the world with your money. Cash and gold were different. You couldn’t go in and out of an airport with cash or gold and not be questioned. There were limits. Satoshi’s invention had no limits. His vision was off-limits to small thinkers. Those who took over Satoshi’s invention let greed get the best of them. Satoshi understood greed — it led to the 2008 financial crisis. Satoshi planned for greed, too. Several founding members of his technology attempted to change the code he had created (known as forking). Satoshi built in consensus. He made it so 95% of the community had to agree for the change to become effective, knowing humans would never agree to do it if they understood what he’d truly created. The “fork experiment” to change his code failed several times. Greed was proven to be an inferior force to his code. I discovered Satoshi’s experiment a few years in. I was instantly fascinated with the idea of what he built. I had my doubts about the technology surviving. Still, I began investing money in the technology. The more I looked into it the more I understood: this was Web 3.0. Ownership on the internet was a problem. Satoshi’s technology was a bold move to shift the power back to the internet user. The question was simple: What if the users owned the network? What if the users who worked on building and maintaining the network got all the rewards, not a few fat cat business empires? It took me a while to understand. Internet money was one thing. Changing how humans got paid, transacted, and owned the work they created was a revolutionary concept. Money controls society. What if you could change money to change society for the better? I was infinitely fascinated. 2017 came around. The hype bubble around internet money exploded. Even the lunch lady was talking about what Satoshi created. Tulipmania had set in. The invention was still an infant, not ready to be exploited by adults in suits. The price of Satoshi’s dream plummeted. Everybody called me stupid for investing. I endured two years of people telling me how dumb I was, especially because I worked in a bank and should have known better. Ignorance was bliss. I ignored everybody’s advice. They weren’t qualified. They didn’t know what this was. I spent hours and hours getting my head around mining, block rewards, competitors, new types of networks that were emerging. I went to meetups. I heard from businesses who accepted this strange form of internet money. I tried the test ATMs that allowed you to buy and sell this internet money. Still, people said “you’re a sucker. Haven’t you learned your lesson?” The insults hurt. The critics were real. They were temporarily right. In 2020, the problem Satoshi solved finally had a use case. Interest rates went to zero like he predicted. A random health crisis became the excuse for the collapse of financial markets. Returns on assets like bonds plummeted — even paying negative interest rates in some countries. Savers were smacked in the face the hardest. Interest payable on bank accounts went to virtually nothing. Everyday people who maybe had never invested in financial assets got to see the problem now, too. Where do I put my money? became the question of 2020. When the health crisis struck, governments printed trillions of dollars as Satoshi predicted. In 2008 the US government printed $1.3 trillion. In 2020, they printed $3 trillion with trillions more needed. No inflation was felt. All the extra money ended up in the stock market, driving stock prices to new highs — despite record unemployment, a collapse in global GDP, an out of control health crisis, and oil prices going negative. Rather than measure inflation the old way — through the consumer price index — CEOs of publicly-traded tech companies started saying this: “What if inflation was measured in stock prices?” A light bulb exploded in my head. When you have more money than you need, you don’t buy 6-figures worth of pizza. You buy stocks or property. That’s why stock prices were going up when the economic reality was going to be down the toilet for a year or two. 2020 was the year internet money changed for good. PayPal and Square got into it. Visa got into it. JP Morgan backflipped and admitted it was an important asset class. Fidelity Investments with $3 trillion under management got into it. Citibank came out with bold predictions like “each coin will be worth $300,000 by the end of 2021.” The CEO of the world’s largest asset manager, Black Rock, said it’s here to stay. Famous investors like Paul Tudor Jones, Stan Druckenmiller, and Jim Cramer all decided to invest. Ex-Goldman Sachs banker, Raoul Pal, went all-in and placed 98% of his available cash into internet money. I have made one good investment in my lifetime: Bitcoin. People continually tell me I’m stupid because of my decision. Internet trolls leave harsh comments. Folks on twitter call me stupid. Meanwhile, after work I keep spending 1–2 hours a day understanding more about Web 3.0, where bitcoin will be the store of value and Ethereum will be the layer on top that everything from apps to networks is built on. I spend a good amount of time reading about people who have vastly different opinions to my own. While I know a bit about the blockchain space, I don’t know everything. Things can change. New technologies can be created. Bitcoin is like anything in life — you have to take the time to learn about it, then you will understand the problem it solves and how to value it. I started buying Bitcoin in the first few years of its life. The first coin I ever got my hands on was worth $100. Now one coin is worth $18,000 USD. My original investment in Bitcoin has gone up 17,900%. Bitcoin is the best performing asset of the last decade and was up 170% in 2020. It pays to do your own research about finance and the future of money. Bitcoin and Ethereum are only getting started. Because real money that is governed by code rather than greedy humans is needed more than ever. It’s now obvious cryptocurrency is mainstream — and it’s still early. When you take the time to make one good investment and back your decision despite all the critics, you can set yourself up for life and never work a normal job again if you choose. It pays you to have a Web 3.0 financial education. This article is for informational purposes only, it should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.
Visuals Economic Evolution Thomas J Novak Disclaimers 1. I wish to contend that Micro and Macro Economics each constitute a hidden branch of evolution. To be clear, I’m not arguing for an analogy, I’m arguing each branch is an evolutionary process; and with this comes the mathematical framework needed to scientifically objectify success (major goal for every Capitalist). 2. The quantitative aspects are partially rooted in Game Theoretic Evolution. I do not expect this theory will garner majority support or understanding. It is only an esoteric theoretical ideal; but it is my hope that this will gradually change until one-day we have a Utopia. 3. The mechanism is voluntary through rational self-incentives. It advocates for a change in perspective for optimal decision making purposes. 4. Dollars and other fiat currencies are still completely necessary. Fiat currency constitutes a valuable technology that eliminates the need for bartering, yielding considerable savings in life’s prime asset - TIME. 5. I apologize to the reader in advance for the long essay. I hope it is "worth" your time. Key Conclusions Present day humanity is full of capitalists that have the right idea but are missing some key math. This is causing them to behave inefficiently in the context of their own self-interests. Ideal Capitalism is Pareto Optimal and should be practiced by all; and it should lead to maximal economic growth. I also wish to conjecture that a new Nash Equilibrium is available to our race: Perpetual peacetime under the individual Pareto Optimal Strategy of Ideal Capitalism as every individual looks to maximize their self-fortune and troll farms are voluntarily dismantled. If this sounds too good to be true, note that it very well may have been for all of human-history save the last few decades. Key developments are nuclear weapons and the internet. Discussed more in the last section. Introduction The "science" of Economics is not yet a science. Don't get me wrong - micro-economics is just about there; but macro-econ is a totally different story. Some call it “The Dismal Science” because it makes many quantitative claims that are inconsistent with empirical data. An example is the claim that John Rockefeller’s fortune could be made comparable to contemporary fortunes by adjusting his dollars for inflation and real growth. In fact only adjusting his hours for real growth does the trick. In general macro-econ has a zero-sum-dollar-centric structure that does not allow for input of things like maternity and child rearing - two fundamentally "valuable" human activities. Another problem is that planetary-wide risks like war, (and that which is assured by "Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD)), are not naturally measurable in dollars. Some concepts from financial mathematics and science can generalize economic measurements into a co-compatible theory that almost seems too simple to be necessary. Basic results agree with common sense in every way. Some conclusions are so obvious the calculation seems pointless. Others might be beyond common sense similar to the notion that the Earth on which one walks is anything but flat. The former supports credence for the latter. All examples of human stupidity supports a need for all of it. Ideal Capitalism Most powers past through present can be thought cold, "calculating”, and self-interested; and most presently embrace association with Capitalism. Paradoxically, human history, (even recent), is a litany of fighting and stupidity and hurt feelings. These are inefficiencies from the Capitalist perspective, so something must be wrong with these “calculations”. The argument will start with a Micro-Economic exercise intended to provide quantitative framework to measure just how unCapitalistic many present-day capitalists are acting, by unitizing all their actions in a scientific manner. Any Capitalist wishing to maximize their net-worth will be made more materialistically rich simply by maintaining complete indifference about others, understanding the entire picture, and trusting numbers. Wall Street can confirm this is its goal. “Complete indifference” means precisely 0 concern for anything other than material-self-worth and 100% concern for material-self-worth. Nonzero concern for others, positive or negative, is suboptimal since it distracts from the objective of maximizing self-worth. Footnote 1: “Others” does not include the friends and family category. All intentional altruism can be represented easily by having those individuals' interests summed and grouped together so as to be viewed as part of the Capitalist’s “self-interest”. All reasoning forward is unaffected by how many friends and family are now implied to be included. The results can empower all decision makers to calculate in the only way possible: with actual mathematics. The numbers will sometimes disagree with intuition; but the numbers will always be correct. The optimal strategy will hardly change except for sufficiently wealthy individuals. The proof can be seen empirically by back-testing the model in history on the domain in which all success is measured: quality-weighted-time (qwt). The definition of qwt will leverage Game Theoretic Evolution and is discussed more below. Some conclusions may be counterintuitive similar to the way natural selection favored Symbiogenesis; but maximum profit calls for absolute “trust” in numbers above all else - exactly as exhibited in microbial evolution. Any call for “selfless” acting resulting in benefits to others is strictly incidental; and any less is unselfishly selfish in that it renders this inefficient capitalist less wealthy than maximally possible. Step 1 - Any political bias about aiding others should be deleted. An “Ideal Capitalist” expresses precisely 0 concern for others and what others think - no more, no less. As long as an individual is correctly acting in their own best interests, they are acting as a Capitalist. Contra-positively one can claim to be a capitalist and act inefficiently against their own interests as many “capitalists” will be shown are doing today. I suggest a new term “Maximalist” to mean an Ideal Capitalist and avoid the need for case sensitivity. Step 2 - Success Spawns Success. What is meant by quality-weighted-time? The definition comes from the only objective arbiter possible: Evolution through Survival of the Fittest. Something is “fit”, or “successful”, if it results in more quantity (Q) or more quality (q), where more quality means it produced more Quantity faster - which renders it more successful. This is The Tautology of Evolutionary Game Theory (The Tautology). For any evolutionary process, quantity is the metric which quantifies success. Quality is measured in quantity per unit of time (q=Q/t). Note that multiplying q=Q/t with t yields Q=qwt: the metric of success that necessarily satisfies The Tautology. Footnote 2: The word “tautology” is meant in the propositional logic sense. No negative connotation should be inferred. Step 3 - How to connect economics with evolution? Micro-economic decision strategy for trading time (t) for dollars ($), (or $ for t), amounts to a “phenotype”, (or observable trait), coded for by genetics inherited or mutated, and ideas learned or created. Respectively: - Inherited genetics constrain every rational human to be “risk averse”, regardless of self-perception, because natural selection favored and continues to favor risk aversion. Defined below and proven further below. - Mutated genes are almost never favorable for a human so this case will be discarded (although this force is quite powerful over quintillions of human-hours). - Richard Dawkins creatively postulated ideas to be “memes”: new evolutionarily viable packets of information, subject to selection forces, as they spread from person to person with varying levels of success overtime. Respectively gene inheritance and mutation is analogous to meme learning and creation. Furthermore the economy can be seen as a subsection of the biosphere governed primarily by evolution through forces of selection. The economy evolves through selection of both genes and memes, and memes are more abstract; but this should not change anything about the evolutionary game theory. After all humanity itself is naturally occurring, so Artificial Selection of Genes and Memes can be seen as a more complex extended phenotype coded for by the evolution of genes through Natural Selection. Any argument that “Artificial Selection” constitutes a meaningful difference from “Natural Selection” must first come to terms with the observation that humanity is itself, naturally occurring. Step 4 - What is the definition of “risk averse”? The mathematical definition of risk averse simply requires diminishing returns to be experienced on assets like dollars. For example: an additional $1M adds less “utility” if you presently have $2B, compared to if you presently have $2M. If a person is not risk averse, then more success encourages more risky behavior. This is inconsistent with the observation that more success means one has more to lose. Therefore any risk-inclined individual cannot be an Ideal Capitalist as they will almost surely go broke gambling. Step 5 - What is “utility”? Utility is the abstract micro-economic concept that, by definition, quantifies value. The unsettled question of how to actually do this is addressed below. Total Utility = True Material Self-Worth = “well-offness”. All have one-to-one correspondence with each other. All are “mutually inclusive”. For example: twice the quantity of utility, by definition, means twice material self-worth; and so, the individual is exactly twice better-off. Diminishing returns do not apply to quantities of utility. Step 6 - How to define an objective function to maximize utility? Per Wikipedia: “Consider a set of alternatives facing an individual, and over which the individual has a preference ordering. A ‘utility function’ is able to represent those preferences if it is possible to assign a real number to each alternative, in such a way that alternative A is assigned a number greater than alternative B if, and only if, the individual prefers alternative A to alternative B.” Keynote: dollars are not material wealth, dollars buy material wealth, with diminishing returns, limited by genes, memes, and the quality and Quantity of the Marketplace (respectively qQMP). To illustrate this, consider how rich you would be with $1T cash on Mars in the present day marketplace. Personally as an oxygen breathing Capitalist, I would view my self-worth as constituting a liability - measurable in my personal subjective frame of reference in units of time, weighted by some self-knowable quality of life representing the quantity of misery per hour that I experience dying alone. Presently the quality of the marketplace on Mars is exactly 0 because 0 quantity is available for purchase. Footnote 3: The quality of life purchasable given the Time and Place is shown below to be bounded from above, although it is by no means bounded from below. Back to Earth. If sufficiently rich, then maximizing material wealth calls for buying everything in desired amounts to maximize present quality of Life (qoL), holding ample dollars in reserve to spend on future qoL (like new inventions) and future quantity (like new medicine), and allocating the rest to increase future qQ which is not presently available for purchase. In keeping with The Tautology, qoL enhancements will provide for faster consumption of Quantity (Q=qwt). Note how perfectly this fits with The Tautology. Ideally a good Capitalist with sufficient dollars would employ a strategy so as to maximize qoL at every point in time by exhausting most/all dollars by death. Any argument that an individual cannot meaningfully increase future qQMP fails. As an example: a medical breakthrough for genetic predispositions could yield considerably more time for any one capitalist, with expected returns modeled via actuarial mathematics. Consider just how far Humanity has come since the birth of The Enlightenment - it is easy to see how the not-so-distant future may include considerably more qQoL for sale. (Conversely the future may include far less qQoL if macro-decision-public-policy modeling continues to fail to quantify/unitize the cost of war - discussed more in the Macro Economic qwt section below.) qQ enhancements, although more subjective, can be substantially accelerated by one talented individual. Examples include Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. All are responsible for inventing and/or producing new things which I personally enjoy - the qQoL that I can purchase is greater as a result of their work. My time and money could not purchase such things if they were not invented. As discussed next, micro-economic quality weights are quality of Life (qoL) weights. They have an upper bound that can be “objectively” unitized and measured by the self-interested party's own frame of reference. Step 7 - How can an individual objectively define an upper bound for these inherently subjective quality weights with any mathematical rigor? Is it possible that more dollars does not always result in more utility? Yes! Proof Reductio ad Absurdum Ripping off an idea from one of the greatest thinkers ever - I propose a financial thought experiment: pretend it is possible for you to pause all of society and gamble once at the “Name Your Winnings Casino”. Here you can choose entering into an even bet: 50% of the time you win the largest number of dollars you can mathematically express = $P; or 50% of the time you suffer absolute ruin: the casino takes everything of material value and your dollars and returns you to the real world where no insurance policies exist for you and no friends or family are able to ease your loss by lending a couch to sleep on or pulling strings for a job offeinterview. If you lose you reenter the world a naked homeless person “worth” exactly $0. Four observations follow:
The decision to bet is made independent of any consideration of others, consistent with the Ideal Capitalist.
Any sane human with the smallest capacity for self-honestly could conservatively estimate a walk-away number A, (denominated in dollars), such that if present “net worth” is greater than $A then no bet.
No rational person choosing to bet would play more than once because either they’d lose or they’d win $P and have received the payout they named. “Letting it ride” constitutes an obviously dumb decision born out of the unwillingness to simply express the larger number in the first bet; however, a risk-inclined individual always values more over what they have and so they would be compelled to keep betting. Therefore rationality is mutually exclusive with risk-inclination. Furthermore if the betting person is risk averse, then $A is strictly less than $P for some minimum value of $P.
Some confident rational individual might argue no such number $A exists for them because they’re so good they can start all over if they lose and earn a new fortune; and it would at first glance seem this individual is correct.
Many logical conclusions result: A. An honest estimate for $A irrefutably reveals a hidden upper bound for this individual’s “Utility Curve”. Specifically if the function A’($A) = A’ maps to utility derived by $A dollar denominated “wealth”, then no amount of dollars even exists for this individual to choose to bet. Mathematically: “Net worth” > “Bet value” => “Net worth” > “50% times upside minus 50% times downside” => A’($A) > .5A’($A+$P) - .5A’($A) => 1.5A’($A) > .5A’($A+$P) => 3A’($A) > A’($A+$P) for all values of $P (The left hand-side must be greater or the bet would not be declined by a rational individual.) B. 3A’ is not presently purchasable with any amount of dollars. 3A’ may be purchased in some future marketplace, (possibly with less than A future dollars), in the form of a medical breakthrough or buying future children birthday presents, but it is not currently purchasable in the present as demonstrated by the individual’s refusal to bet. Conversely A future dollars may lose “purchasing power” of just A’ if the future marketplace is inferior. Therefore true material-worth is fundamentally a function of the marketplace and cannot even be expressed in terms of dollars. C. Most choosing to bet would logically express the upside payout $P as a sequence of 9s. Many more would know to use powers of powers. Knowledge of Knuth’s Up Arrow Notation could simultaneously save time and yield considerably “more upside”. Due consideration for exactly how much time should be spent writing out fantastically large numbers reveals an irrefutably objective hidden limiting factor: this person’s lifetime - measurable in units of time. This reveals one of two hidden domains on which value must be measured - TIME! D. From this it directly follows that the confident individual in (4) is wrong. Some number $A<$P must exist, EVEN FOR THEM. However this individual is sure $A doesn’t and keeps writing numbers out for $P until they die. Therefore $A for them equals the number they have written out at time of death, never having played the game. I believe this is the definition of a Darwinian unfit capitalist - completely inconsistent with the Ideal Capitalist. Analysis The argument above establishes a horizontal bound for utility – lifetime measurable in units of time. It also establishes a finite upper bound for utility itself (represented by the area of the “utility rectangle” - see spreadsheet). This implies a finite upper bound for the rectangle’s height must exist; and this is empirically supported by the observation that billionaires are not known to blow through their life fortune in any short-period of time. So why does any sufficiently wealthy capitalist focus on earning more dollars and die before exhausting most/all of their dollars (last death if family inheritance involved)? If sufficiently wealthy, material wealth is necessarily a bounded function of The Time Period, or the “quality and Quantity of the Marketplace”. TTP = qQMP >= qQoL. In other words, the marketplace itself is secretly an asset for every Capitalist! qMP(TTP) = Max quality of life, or “max utility per hour” available for purchase in TTP QMP(TTP) = Max Quantity of life, or “max utility” for purchase in TTP (IE a longer vacation or medicine) Thus on the micro level, quality weights are utility weights; and utility weights are capped by The Time Period. Thus it is the case that for every (finite) individual, a finite upper bound for utility is self-measurable in Time Period-Weighted Time (qwt = TPWT). For example: 2020 hours have far more value to any sufficiently rational and wealthy individual (SRWI) than 1920 hours. And as the earlier questionnaire (hopefully) shows, this is realizable by most middle-class people today. In other words, today’s middle class is sufficiently wealthy to the extent TPWT resolves the Rockefeller paradox. Footnote8: The size of the middle class itself is unfortunately shrinking. This has potential to result in negative externalities for all. Since an Ideal Capitalist maximizes self-material-wealth above all else, then if they were also sufficiently wealthy, they would measure value in Time-Period-Weighted Hours since they would always purchase maximum utility per hour. This is by definition, since any SRWI has all necessary means to purchase max utility available per hour. (Note just how important quick access to true information would be.) Footnote 9: Neuroscience could use Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to objectively measure the Micro-Economic utility unit as “Neurotransmitter-Molecular-Count Weighted Hours”. Consideration for how to weight different neurotransmitters (like Serotonin vs Dopamine) would be necessary. For now, we are all similar enough for “time” to suffice, at least for short run measurements. For example: what is the penalty for severe crimes? “Time in jail” or death (all the person’s time). Quantifying the Marketplace Given the average life expectancy now is more than twice that of prehistoric man, the marketplace itself is worth strictly more than 50% of any sufficiently wealthy individual’s “asset portfolio”. Just note “time is money”. Footnote 10: They need not be rational to "realize" this time, so long as their doctor is sufficiently competent. "Realization" will come in the form of living longer, quite consistent with the accounting definition of gain/loss realization. Keynote - a Maximalist will do more than just maximize present qQ purchased. They will also divert unneeded dollars to maximize future qQMP so that more qQ is available for purchase. Thus the Maximalist calculation includes due consideration for additional dollars that will be needed given future qQ becomes available. Squaring Theory with Reality Most already know most of this, at least on the common-sense level. So why don’t sufficiently wealthy Capitalists invest maximum dollars with less strings attached to maximize the future? Is it because that would help everyone else and constitute socialism? No! In this context socialism is Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”. A good Capitalist aims for precisely 0 concern about others, and any concern for implied socialism would constitute nonzero concern. Such concern would amount to incomprehensible irrationality far beneath any good Capitalist. So what else could it be? Perhaps it’s simply the fact that much of humanity is still measuring their net-worth in the wrong dimension for the inefficient purpose of feeling superior to others with less money. Anyone currently doing this quite literally knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, not even their own self fortune, because they are using the wrong dimension of measurement. quality-weighted-time is the objectively correct way in which real value should be measured, and quality weighting is limited only by The Time Period in which time and money are being spent. More noteworthy, any human mistaking dollars for qwt for this scorekeeping reason is still violating the prime rule of being a good Capitalist - they are demonstrating nonzero-concern for what others think of them. Implicitly and inefficiently, these individuals are expressing negative concern for others, as now is measurable by how worse off they are in units of their time. Specifically this is calculable as the opportunity cost of not investing more dollars for an enhanced future marketplace, measurable by others in said marketplace by the cost to this imperfect capitalist’s life expectancy, (all unitized in units of time). Equity Miracle Swap Instruments Perhaps the above explanations are not exhaustive of the full truth. Maybe some sufficiently wealthy Capitalists simply do not have the means to invest their dollars in a way that can reliably pay greater dividends. Therefore I propose a new type of financial derivative instrument called an “Equity Miracle Swap”. These would be voluntarily issued as contracts from the mega-wealthy. Here is a hypothetical example: Rational (and thus risk averse) Billionaire-G (BG) possessing $100B in dollar-denominated-capital can now do research and will likely find they are genetically predisposed to a (presently) incurable illness (let’s say Small Cell Lung Cancer = SCLC). BG could use the chancy math in the proof above and might determine that Billions $91-$100 have minimal true value to him/herself when converted to qwt. Therefore BG could decide to start up an enterprise to find a cure for SCLC and use a $10B Equity Miracle Swap = EMSSCLC-$10B, or just “EMS” for short. The purpose is to maximally incent the researchers, who might otherwise just be employees. The contract would stipulate that all equity in the enterprise transfers over to the research team only upon successful development of the cure. When measured in dollars, the payoff for BG is represented by the performance of the stock, which is greater than -$10B if no cure; or -$10B if the miracle cure is found. The former is greater than the latter. Which do you think BG will prefer? Obviously the latter, especially if they wind up contracting SCLC in the future! But the former was greater measured in dollars? How to reconcile? This can be quantitatively reconciled by using the correct unit of measurement - qwt. Here is how: the newly discovered cure might empower their remaining dollars to purchase considerably more qwt in the future. The real expected return on investment for BG could be calculated actuarially as follows: Expected ROI = { Expected Return }/{ Investment } = { E(Δqwt | Miracle) * [ P(Miracle | EMS) - P(Miracle | no EMS) ] }/{ A’($100B) - A’($90B) } Where: 1. A’($D) maps to utility measured in quality-weighted-time presently purchasable by D dollars 2. E(Δqwt | Miracle) = Expected change in purchasable qwt given miracle cure occurs in lifetime 3. P(Miracle | Event X) = Probability of Miracle given Event X Note that because BG is risk averse, diminishing returns render billions $91-$100 worth very little qwt. Therefore the cost in the denominator = A’($100B) - A’($90B) constitutes a very small amount of qwt, rendering the expected ROI very large, even for relatively small changes to P(Miracle). Obviously the lawyers could tinker with the terms of the contract. Finally note that society is incidentally made better off if the cure is found. Macro-Economic qwt Please now consider the benefit of a qwt-centric model from a Macro-Economic standpoint in the context of the Doomsday Clock, where as always, economics can objectively measure value (or “GDP”) in units of quality-weighted-time. On this Macro scale, the quantity unit will be "Healthy Human Hours", calculated as always by multiplying quality weights of presently healthy humans, with units of time, where any human is healthy if he/she produces more future human hours. Note how naturally maternity and child-raising now fit into GDP. This may also help resolve the argument over which crimes should be punishable with incarceration - specifically only crimes where the individual is deemed likely to contribute less negative future qwt to GDP when in jail vs when out of jail. Also there is a natural extension of this for the death penalty, although I do not wish to make such moral judgements. Footnote 10: Any argument that population overgrowth leads to mass death is correct. Policy models need only step back and estimate healthy human hours in the more distant future. Calculus can be used to model public policy decisions from present-day infinitely far into the future and compare infinite relativities for different policy options. Also consider that actuarial modeling could be used to objectively estimate the cost of disinformation posed to every Capitalist on the planet, measurable of course, in units of time. Specifically calculated as expected changes to Humanity’s Expectation of Life on the Doomsday Clock, plus individual life expectancy given Midnight, times the probability of midnight. Also observe the need and means for due discount in modeling the "decrease" in the future qQMP (which might include radiation). The Emergence of Economic Symbiogenesis Try to arrive at the conclusion any good Capitalist must. Here is a hint - genetic Symbiogenesis resulted in the planetary-wide cooperation of all plant and animal life to regulate Earth’s Oxygen concentration. Note the immense success is, of course, measured in qwt. Weighting in this context needs to satisfy the same tautology as always. Therefore the final answer on this Mega-Macro scale comes in organism-count-weighted units of time. This is the current game strategy that genetic Evolution has concluded on Earth to date. It came from pitting individual selfish microbial interests against one another in the 0-rules game of survival of the fittest. The result is the current marriage between the Plant and Animal Kingdoms! (Like all great marriages there are still a few mentionable skirmishes.) Also observe the micro-macro relational analogue between Chloroplasts and Mitochondria with Plants and Animals. Consider how this might analogize individual decision making with the marketplace as a whole. If you are religious, consider just how correct this implies your understanding of God’s wish for the general wellbeing of every individual to be. My conclusion is that there is a trail of breadcrumbs for our species to follow and we’ve had the right idea all along. We’ve just been doing the math wrong. Now every decision maker can better understand how to measure their own self-fortune and get to growing it faster! Also interesting is the game theoretic argument for why every person must be allowed full forgiveness - it is the only way world leaders who are concerned for their own wellbeing could possibly embrace such a model. Astonishingly full forgiveness is 100% consistent with every major religion’s claim of what God hopes all of us can achieve. In economics, any desire for revenge can now be seen as The Sunk Cost Fallacy, measurable as always in units of qwt. Finally, I wish to conjecture that a new Nash Equilibrium is available to our race: Perpetual peacetime under the individual Pareto Optimal Strategy of Ideal Capitalism as every individual looks to maximize their self-fortune and troll farms are voluntarily dismantled. If this sounds too good to be true, note that it very well may have been for all of human-history save the last few decades. Key Technological Developments 1. The advent of nuclear weapons which align all of humanity's interests in a way which never used to exist. Even survivors of a nuclear war will be far worse off, now as measurable by decreases to the quality and Quantity of any future radioactive marketplace. Less qwt for purchase! 2. The advent of the internet renders information around the globe nearly free and instantaneous. If we can learn to be more self-interested, the only conclusion which rationally follows is to dismantle all troll farms for the simple purpose of maximizing Macro Time until Doomsday. The New Nash Equilibrium available to our race could be quantitatively modeled with actuarial techniques, and the optimal solution is to push Midnight infinitely far into the future by allowing every rational decision maker the means to make rational decisions with 100% true information. The internet sets up a worldwide analogy with our nervous system. Footnote 11 - The Micro-Economic Model is now consistent with John Lennon's definition of life success: happiness. When asked what he wanted to “be” when he grew up, John responded "happy". John’s teacher thought he misunderstood the question. If John's teacher had instead followed up with the question to quantify: "How happy do you want to be?" - John could have replied: "as happy as possible for all my years.” Footnote 12 - Warren Buffet's advice to "do what you love so you never work a day in your life" is quantified naturally by the model. I hope that more will start to take this advice. The qwt-centric-micro-model shows they will quite literally be made richer as a result. Given that richer people tend to contribute more to GDP, society will be made incidentally better off as a result. Star Trek almost had it but missed two words: “we work to better ourselves, and incidentally, the rest of mankind”.
A Deep Dive - Ghislaine Maxwell: Silver Spoons and Hard Times
This story was published in Frank's Report. Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist.Frank Reportis one of the internet’s best destinations for true, unfiltered, hard-hitting journalism run by the acclaimed journalist Frank Parlato. Since 2015, articles published onFrank Reporthave exposed major scandals and criminal enterprises (including the NXIVM Cult. Frank Parlato has been cited as a source by hundreds of major media outlets around the world, including the New York Times, The Daily Mail, VICE News, CNN, Fox News, Albany Times Union, New York Post, Rolling Stone, People Magazine, Oxygen, Hollywood Life, E! News, CBS Inside Edition, Televisa (Mexico, Stern (Germany, Brisbane Times (Australia, Sun (UK, Hamilton Spectator (Canada), Haaretz (Israel), Tibetan Journal (Tibet), Dnevnik (Croatia), New Zealand Herald, Sputnik News (Russia), Voici (France), Blich (Switzerland), Pour Femme (Italy), CM Journal (Portugal) and more. Frank Parlato was the lead investigator and coordinating producer of Investigation Discovery’s 2 hour blockbuster special ‘The Lost Women of NXIVM.’))))) From sex trafficking cults disguised as self-empowerment groups to government cronyism depriving citizens of tax-funded programs, Frank Report doesn’t just turn stones – it outright obliterates them. Welcome to Frank Report, one of the internet’s finest examples of real, unbridled journalism.
----
Ghislaine Maxwell – Silver Spoons and Hard Times
August 9, 2020 By Paul Serran https://frankreport.com/2020/08/09/ghislaine-maxwell-silver-spoons-and-hard-times/ http://archive.is/by7md Ghislaine Maxwell led much of her life under the world’s fascinated microscopic view, always enthralled by her – famous and infamous – as it watched her fortunes wax and wane. From the celebrated miracle daughter of media tycoon Robert Maxwell; to the broken young woman who fled scandal in the UK to a small New York apartment, trying to launch a new life; the rebirth Jet-set Ghislaine, who was everywhere at once, longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein, a man even richer and more shady than her father; the sophisticated middle age woman, a runaway alleged criminal trying hard to avoid detection by her pursuers – finally, to the incarcerated, indicted suspected sex trafficker and perjurer. Ghislaine was Robert and Betty Maxwell’s miracle baby, born on Christmas Day, 1961. Two days after that, their eldest son suffered a fatal car accident. In 24 hours, it all had been somehow foretold: joy – and then tragedy. During the Swinging Sixties, Robert Maxwell served two terms as a Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Buckingham. He led a multimillionaire lifestyle, and was the host of star-studded parties at Headington Hill Hall, his baronial fifty-three-room Oxford mansion. The Maxwells spent a million dollars redecorating the mansion. In a stained glass window scene for the imperial staircase, Israeli sculptor Nehemia Azaz depicted Robert Maxwell as the biblical hero Samson tearing down the gates of Gaza: “a titan of luck, impossible achievement, and unlimited wealth”. They had the use of chauffeured luxury cars. They traveled the world in Robert’s Gulfstream IV Jet and his sleek 180-foot yacht, named Lady Ghislaine. “If Bob Maxwell didn’t exist, no one could invent him,” Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock celebrated the bombastic, demanding mogul who dined with kings and presidents and had a bottomless appetite for family, food, fortune, and fame. The first brush with financial and professional hardship came at a age when young Ghislaine would have been mostly sheltered from it. In the early seventies, after Robert Maxwell tried similar shenanigans in a failed attempt to swindle the American financier Saul Steinberg, who was interested in a strategic acquisition of Pergamon Press. Steinberg claimed that during negotiations, Maxwell falsely stated that a subsidiary responsible for publishing encyclopedias was extremely profitable. At the same time, Pergamon had been forced to reduce its profit forecasts for 1969 during the period of negotiations, leading to a suspension of dealing in Pergamon shares on the London stock markets. It was found that Maxwell had contrived to maximize Pergamon’s share price through transactions between his private family companies. This was a criminal practice he would utilize again in the future. Inspectors from Britain’s Department of Trade and Industry declared Maxwell unfit to run a public company: “Notwithstanding Mr. Maxwell’s acknowledged abilities and energy, he is not in our opinion a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company.” ‘Captain Bob’ established the Maxwell Foundation in tax haven Liechtenstein, in 1970. By the 1980s he come back roaring, prompted by money later said to have originated in the Soviet Union. He bought the Mirror Group built and a massive media conglomerate. The good times were on: Ghislaine was nicknamed “The Shopper” because of her wild spending funded by Robert’s millions. He also bankrolled her failed corporate gifts business. During this period, she reportedly had a VERY close relationship with her father and was widely credited with being her father’s favorite child. In Oxford, Ghislaine led a student life of wealth and privilege. Her father would send Filipino servants to the college house she shared to clean, arrange the table and cook, in the event of a party. Her career piggybacked on her father’s businesses. She was made director of the Oxford United, and later, put in charge of “special projects” of the New York Daily News. With her father’s money, she found her way into society, especially in New York — a haven where she could escape his complete control. But the good times were not to last. Overextended and over-leveraged, Maxwell’s empire was about to crumble. At this time, Maxwell reportedly was a regular at London’s casinos, playing three tables at once, even dropping $2.5 million in a single night. For years, he had been an inveterate gambler, but this was the behavior of a desperate man whose time was running out. “He was a very crude man,” said a female writer for Time magazine. “His polish was not very deep. If you were with him for any length of time, it peeled away. I was in his library in the Maxwell House penthouse—a beautiful apartment with marble and servants all over the place—and while I was admiring his books, his valet said to me, ‘You should see Mr. Maxwell’s collection of pornographic tapes’.” Ghislaine visited her father in his office before he flew off to Gibraltar. “He was looking for an apartment in New York—a sort of pied-à-terre, where he could talk and have meetings—and he wanted me to help him,” she told Vanity Fair. “He asked me to go see a particular apartment. He said, ‘If you like it, I’ll make time to see it and come to New York.’ ” But the next time Ghislaine saw her father, he was dead. ”Ghislaine is the baby of the family and the one who was closest to her father,” her mother Betty told Vanity Press. ”The whole of Ghislaine’s world has collapsed, and it will be very difficult for her to continue.” When she finally appeared before the reporters, she had collected herself. “How did your father die?” a journalist shouted at Ghislaine Maxwell. “He did not commit suicide. That was just not consistent with his character. I think he was murdered. ” Maxwell, it turned out, had debts of nearly $5 billion, and had stolen hundreds of millions from the Mirror Group’s pension funds to shore up his faltering companies. That left 32,000 employees exposed to retirement ruin. The irony was not lost on the hard-hitting British press: Robert Maxwell, a socialist, stealing hundreds of millions of pounds from the Mirror’s pension fund! He swindled money from two of his public companies, transferred millions in and out the secret family trusts in Liechtenstein, to manipulate the share price of his Corporation. Robert was called “rogue,” “crook,” “bully,” “thief,” “megalomaniac,” and “gangster.” The press told lurid tales of his sex orgies with midget Filipino hookers. He was seen as a 310-pound aberration gorging on spoonfuls of caviar. An erratic and cruel tyrant who used Turkish towels for toilet paper. Journalists wrote that he was a spy for the K.G.B. or Mossad or Czech intelligence—or all three. “My daughter Ghislaine has no money, no trusts, no funds anywhere.” her mother Betty told Vanity Fair. “Neither of [my children] had any money. Their father never gave them any money.” Their assets were frozen. His son Kevin’s house was put up for sale, as were the Lady Ghislaine and the Gulfstream IV Jet. Their passports were seized. A friend told TheTimes of London, “[Ghislaine] had always been the life and soul of the party wherever she wanted to go in the world and never had to worry about money.” Now she was the broken child of a monster, his name forever synonymous to scandal. “She was catatonic,” the friend said. Forced to vacate her huge company-provided residence, she moved into a small apartment. When a friend came to visit, Ghislaine told her, “They took everything—everything—even the cutlery.” Little did she know how many more times things in her life would shift from silver spoons to hard times. A woman brought up in luxury, she had everything taken from her, before she came to the United States to begin again. “He wasn’t a crook,” Ghislaine told Vanity Press. “A thief to me is somebody who steals money. (…) Did he put it in his own pocket? Did he run off with the money? No. And that’s my definition of a crook.” “I’m surviving—just,” she said. “But I can’t just die quietly in a comer. I have to believe that something good will come out of this mess. It’s sad for my mother. It’s sad to have lost my dad. It’s sad for my brothers. But I would say we’ll be back. Watch this space.” Ghislaine Maxwell was also being hunted by the tabloids. The Maxwell name was so detested in London that she is said to have had to walk around in a blond wig so people wouldn’t recognize her. Ghislaine Maxwell’s reinvention didn’t take long. Maxwell moved to the United States just after her father’s death. Her photograph boarding a Concorde to cross the Atlantic caused outrage – her father had just defrauded pensioners out of 750 Million Sterling Pounds. According to the Mail on Sunday: “Unnoticed by almost everybody, traveling with her was a greying, plumpish, middle-aged American businessman who managed to avoid the photographers. It is to this man that 30-year-old Ghislaine has turned to ease the heartache of her father’s shame.” “His name is Jeffrey Epstein.” “Whose house is this, Ghislaine?” a friend asked her in the early 1990’s. “Who lives here?” My friend,” Maxwell replied. “Well, is he banging you?” the friend demanded. “What’s the scoop here?” A trust fund is said to have provided her with an income of $145,000 a year. A far cry from her previous seemingly unending wealth. She “never, ever had any cash. Lots of credit, of course, but no cash”, one friend recalled to the press. And yet, she lived the high life. She was known in New York as the “female Gatsby” for her lavish entertaining. Had a “reputation for being charming and funny, and a glittering lifestyle straight out of the pages of a society magazine”. She was now “far from the ever watchful eye of the British press,” Hello! magazine wrote in 1997. “She is proud of the fact that her new life is all down to her own hard work and has her elegant apartment to show for it,” the magazine mistakenly added. One day, she would “get married and have kids. But it has never been a focus: My focus is my business.” Ghislaine’s presence added more fuel to the question: “How did Jeffrey Epstein amass his fortune?” For one of the most propagated theories is that Maxwell’s father Robert bankrolled him with funds hidden from the UK authorities. Jeffrey Epstein built a 21,000-square-foot mansion on a massive ranch in New Mexico, which – he boasted – made his New York townhouse “look like a shack”. He named it the Zorro Ranch. He also acquired a 72-acre island in the Virgin Islands and an 8,600-square-foot home in Paris, with a specially built massage room. She had found a path back to the lifestyle she’d lost when her father died. “She was used to living very well,” says a friend who knew her then. “She didn’t want to go back to where she was.” All she had to do to keep it was to give ‘the monster’ what he wanted. Maxwell was expected to drop everything to serve Epstein. She had to keep everyone in line, because one misstep would unleash the wrath of Epstein, one of the few people who could make Maxwell cry. “He would be screaming over the phone,” recalled an Epstein victim, “and she would burst into tears.” The New York townhouse became a social nexus; guests could have included members of the Kennedy and Rockefeller clans, “along with the requisite sprinkling of countesses and billionaires,” according to The Times of London. She was “a modern-day geisha” in a “domain filled with the richest people in the planet. “It’s a world frequented by young half-naked girls in bikinis, billionaires and lavish lifestyles, but it borders on the grotesque. You are never really sure what is going on behind closed doors.” Royalty was specially prized, which is why her friendship with Prince Andrew became so treasured. In 2000, Maxwell and Epstein attended a Prince Andrew’s party at the Queen’s Sandringham House estate in Norfolk, England. It has been reported that the event was in honor of Maxwell’s 39th birthday. And yet, Ghislaine began trying to distance herself from Epstein long before he went to jail. In the early 2000s, she hooked up in California with a man much richer than Epstein: Ted Waitt. Waitt lived in a seven-bedroom, 14-bath mansion in La Jolla, sailed the world aboard a 240-foot mega-yacht, the Plan B. It was equipped with a helipad, Jacuzzi, elevator, gym, and HAD AN ONBOARD SUBMARINE, which Maxwell soon was licensed to pilot. After Epstein went to prison in Florida for a short period, Maxwell saw the silver spoons turned into hard times again. Acquaintances that crossed her path reported how she was almost unrecognizable. She was not stylish and attention grabbing anymore, seemed determined to go unnoticed. Her face had no makeup. There was a hint of gray in her black hair, she put on some weight. “I was so shocked by her look,” a friend recalled to the British press. “I didn’t recognize her.” She even gave up her once proud name, sometimes introducing herself to new acquaintances only as “G.” “Where are you living, Ghislaine?” the friend asked. “I lost touch with you.” Maxwell suddenly went blank. “Oh,” she replied, “a little bit everywhere.” December 2014: Virginia Roberts Giuffre filed a motion in the Southern District of Florida describing Maxwell as Epstein’s “primary coconspirator and participant in his sexual abuse and sex trafficking scheme.” Maxwell made a huge mistake, issuing an “urgent” statement to the media dismissing the claims as “obvious lies.” That allowed Giuffre, to sue Maxwell for defamation in federal court in New York, a lawsuit “widely viewed as a vessel for Epstein’s victims to expose the scope of Epstein’s crimes,” according to the Miami Herald. Maxwell affirmed her innocence with fury, at one point of her testimony banging her fists on the table. She also, according to charges filed by the DOJ SDNY, committed two counts of perjury. 2019: when the SDNY reopened the criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine was far away, living the high life. She met with her friend Prince Andrew in Buckingham Palace, and participated in “Cash & Rocket”, an annual charity road rally. Between races of the rally, she joined the super rich in attending a Masquerade Ball in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as a White dinner at La Reserve in Geneva and the Red party at the Yacht Club de Monaco. Those were to be her last reported events. Cash & Rocket scrub Maxwell’s photo from its website once Epstein was arrested and the scandal assaulted the headlines again. On July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested by federal agents at Teterboro Airport, arriving from Paris. The FBI raided his mansion, and charged him with sex trafficking of minors. “Epstein’s pimp girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, a very well-connected Brit socialite cannot just walk free,” actress Ellen Barking tweeted the day after Epstein’s arrest. “This woman is his pimp. She pilots planes [sic] to and from the island. I know because she told me.” Maxwell again went into hiding, unreachable during legal proceedings. It surfaced in December 2019 that Maxwell was among the people under FBI investigation for facilitating Epstein’s crimes. She was faced with a tabloid frenzy even bigger than the one that accompanied the death of her father. She again uprooted herself and tried to start over in Manchester-by-the-Sea, a quiet village 30 miles north of Boston, she lived for a time in the $3 million, five-bedroom colonial home of Scott Borgerson, CEO of CargoMetrics, a hedge fund investment company involved in maritime data analytics. Since Epstein was found dead in jail, last August, she is reported to have moved 36 times, out of fear for her safety. Credible Death threats arrived by social media, email, phone, text, and postal service. It began in earnest with Epstein’s arrest, multiplied with his death, and accelerated in the months that followed. They soon became a routine part of her life. She hired a professional security firm, with operatives that are veterans of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This photoshopped photo of Maxwell surfaced last year to mislead the public into thinking she was in Los Angeles. Frank Report was the first to report the photo a fake, a story that went viral.
“Where in the world was Ghislaine Maxwell? Everyone, it seemed, had a theory, each wilder than the last. She was said to be hiding deep beneath the sea in a submarine, which she was licensed to pilot. Or she was lying low in Israel, under the protection of the Mossad, the powerful intelligence agency with whom her late father supposedly tangled. Or she was in the FBI witness protection program, or ensconced in luxury in a villa in the South of France, or sunning herself naked on the coast of Spain, or holed up in a high-security doomsday bunker belonging to rich and powerful friends whose lives might implode should Maxwell ever reveal what she knows—all the dirty secrets of the dirty world that she and Epstein shared.” (Vanity Fair – Jul 3, 2020)
Maxwell remained at large, beyond the reach of attorneys, tabloid reporters, and a 10,000-pound reward from The Sun in London. “It’s a little bit like Elvis—you get lots of reports but they’re hard to verify,” a victim attorney said in May. She was periodically said to have been spotted around the world, usually in places where she was not. Reporters scoured the globe. Some said she was in Russia trying to get a Oligarch to protect her. Others pointed to Israel or Brazil, China, Singapore, the Middle East, England. She was “both everywhere and nowhere,” lamented UK’s The Guardian. On August 2019, she was apparently photographed eating a burger and fries in the Cahuenga Boulevard, in the San Fernando Valley. She held The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives. Given Ghislaine and her father Robert’s alleged ties to Intelligence Services, this choice does not seem accidental. Papers were running out of incredible stories to account for her disappearance. A bizarre new theory emerged she could be hiding in a submarine which – as we saw – was not downright impossible, since she DID have a license to pilot underground vehicles. On July 2nd 2020, Maxwell was arrested by the FBI and NYPD in the small New England town of Bradford, New Hampshire. It is situated at driving distance of the NYSD. They finally found her in a luxurious four-bedroom, 4,365-square-foot home on a wooded lot, called Tuckedaway. Ghislaine Maxwell was charged with six federal crimes: luring and enticement of minors, sex trafficking of children and perjury. The crimes took place between 1994 and 1997, the years of her “intimate relationship with Epstein,” when she “assisted, facilitated, and contributed to Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of minor girls.” One of the three unnamed victims was “as young as 14 years old when they were groomed and abused by Maxwell and Epstein, both of whom knew that certain victims were in fact under the age of 18.” FBI assistant director William F. Sweeney Jr. described Maxwell as “one of the villains of this investigation,” who had “slithered away to a gorgeous property” in New Hampshire, where she was “continuing to live a life of privilege while her victims live with the trauma inflicted upon them years ago.” “I am optimistic about my future,” she said in 1997, “and believe things will continue to improve for me as time passes.” Now, according to sources close to her, “I don’t think [Ghislaine] sees there is a future,” came the reply. If found guilty of all charges, Maxwell could face a prison sentence of 35 years. She denies the accusations, and has pleaded not guilty to all six charges. She will await trial locked up in the Metropolitan Detention Center, in Brooklyn. A dreadful prison that is as removed from her previous “silver spoon” upbringing as it’s possible in the US. Hard times. She used to be a larger than life character, who once hosted a dinner for NY socialites on ‘the fine art of giving a blow job’. But then, she really blew it. A report from a source familiar with the Metropolitan Detention Center gives a glum picture of Ghislaine Maxwell’s present conditions. She is in the women’s section and believed to be confined to a solitary cell. Because of the past history of the MDC, it is not impossible to suspect that Ghislaine could be having sexual relations with one or more corrections officers, either male or female. Her available wealth would permit her to buy some privileges directly from the corrections officers who could smuggle in items for her. MDC has a history of guards, male and female, enjoying sex with prisoners and smuggling in everything from alcohol to cell phones to drugs. While she is not enjoying what anyone would call a privileged life, and is most likely [because of Covid protocols] confined to her cell, dank and cold [in summer] perhaps as much as 23-24 hours per day and possibly getting only one hot meal per day, our source says, with her wealth and talent to charm, if there is any privilege, any opportunity, any luxury to enjoy at MDC, she is enjoying it. Of course, she is probably under near-constant surveillance, for no guard wants to go to prison for letting her get murdered or commit suicide – as did her former lover Epstein. It is not known how frequently she is meeting with lawyers in special rooms set aside for the purpose. But an MDC source tells Frank Report that prison officials are known to eavesdrop on those conversations with lawyers and defendants and do so on high profile cases. Whether they report to the prosecution what they learn is unknown. In the end, Maxwell has a hard road to hoe and will remain in the brutal and unsanitary MDC until she stands trial or makes a plea deal or dies. The possibility of additional charges other than those currently charged against her – for hebephilia crimes in the last century – remain a possibility. The late Jeffrey Epstein was a convicted hebephile, a person who has urges for post pubescent but under the age of consent children. Is Ghislaine one also? And are there others, famous and prominent men of power who have indulged as Jeffrey and allegedly Ghislaine have done? The ace in the hole for her, obviously, is, if she has info on other prominent hebephiles that the DOJ for its own partisan or PR reasons might like to selectively prosecute, she can trade that info for a lenient sentence and hopefully not be murdered for doing so. Her former lover, Jeffrey Epstein, might have committed suicide, as the Mainstream Media and the US Govt. urges you to believe, but there are some who find the coincidences, cameras being off, bones broken indicating he was strangled, guards happening to fall asleep as they were assigned to watch the most famous prisoner in the world, such that that it just might cause reasonable people to doubt the official narrative a little more than the corporate media and prison officials would wants us to doubt. The same fate might befall Ghislaine and we may never know just what she did. Whether her crimes were confined to herself and Epstein or whether there was a vast network of hebephiles joining in – or – in fairness to her – she is innocent as she claims, something that a trial, if she makes it to trial, might help us determine. stretcher during the funeral service in Jerusalem’s main convention hall on Nov. 10, 1991. The body is laying on a stretcher, draped in a white Jewish prayer shawl with black stripes as is it tradition of Jewish burials in Israel. (AP Photo/Natik Harnik) Ghislaine is fourth from the left. https://preview.redd.it/vnzmapdilrg51.png?width=432&format=png&auto=webp&s=bde723c918da88ce07aa1091b70c77baa76c0562 https://preview.redd.it/6v6qco3llrg51.png?width=509&format=png&auto=webp&s=7531e39667e4ee9f869b6c56ef8c53e118a8909f https://preview.redd.it/xu6z62snlrg51.png?width=574&format=png&auto=webp&s=c96a9decc1af25e8adc0e31b9cdad1d51c67faee
2020 Triton Super High Roller Series Jeju Postponed Due To Coronavirus Epidemic Marco Biavaschi wins €150,000 Payday at 888poker LIVE Madrid from a €100 Satellite 888poker is Giving Away 50 Free Entries to a $1m Tournament (Every Day) 2020 WSOP Schedule: WSOP $1,500 Buy-In Events Finalized The Badder the Beat, the Better It Is Visited September 28th 2020 with my 91 year-old mother. Because there is no valet or shuttle bus at this time we decided to take an Uber hoping to be dropped off at one of the three entrances. As of right now the casino does not allow any vehicles to pull up at any of the entrances. You are forced to walk far. YONKERS, NY – Empire City Casino by MGM Resorts (“Empire City”) announced today the suspension of racing operations at its harness track, Yonkers Raceway, through Wednesday, March 18th. Empire City learned on Tuesday, March 10th that an employee of the Standardbred Owners Association (“SOA”), the harness horsemen association, tested positive for COVID-19 before passing away. R.I.P Empire Casino Every since the MGM takeover, the place is going downhill fast. Visited 1/19/2020, all the gaming machines on the second floor are gone, yes gone. Now they only have machines on one floor. Also, the lottery operation is one window, no more live quickdraw. The payouts are small. The comps are not worth it at all. Empire City Casino is the ultimate destination for winners like you! $300,000 Ready, Set, Win! January 1 - February 26. How to Enter. M life® Rewards members will receive one entry for every 50 Points earned. Win Up to 10X Entries! GM Resorts said Wednesday that it will reopen Empire City Casino at 25% capacity to the public on September 21.. The announcement means that MGM Resorts will have reopened all but two of its domestic properties in Las Vegas —Four Seasons and Park MGM, which is expected to reopen within the next 30-45 days, the company stated. “This has been an unimaginably difficult and challenging time Empire City Casino is the ultimate destination for winners like you! Learn More. casino. Play Online. Empire City’s Online Casino is free to play and built for entertainment, so you can experience real casino games Yes, we have FREE live entertainment in our Entertainment Lounge 5 nights a week! Click here for a complete schedule. Band/entertainment promotional packages & demos can be sent to: Empire City Casino at Yonkers Raceway Attn: Entertainment Department 810 Yonkers Avenue Yonkers, NY 10704 Empire Casino is the perfect place to go for casino enthusiasts looking for an entertaining night. The style and sheer size of the casino make for a great experience with plenty of table games and electronic games to choose from. You can visit many other casinos while in this part of London and are within walking distance from the nearest hotels and local attractions. Empire City Casino - Yonkers Raceway venue, Yonkers NY events tickets 2020, Search up on all upcoming Empire City Casino - Yonkers Raceway events schedule 2020 and get Empire City Casino - Yonkers Raceway venue tickets for the best seats at a very affordable cost
My name is Brian Christopher, and every day, I post new daily videos of myself playing slot machines in the casino. You'll see some wins, some losses, some jackpot handpays, high limit slots, max ... Video clips of Las Vegas Casinos and the ultimate party scene with nightclubs like Studio 54, Jet inside the Mirage, Body English, Pure, Empire Ballroom, Tryst located inside the Wynn and more ... Caesars Palace Las Vegas Room and Casino Tour January 2020 - Duration: 10:43. ... Feast The Empire - Duration: 0:31. Caesars Palace Las Vegas Hotel and Casino 2,319 views. Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. The sophisticated heart of London brings a new night a Playboy Nightclub. Join us at Tale Bar with a host of celebrities. Welcome to the official YouTube channel of Sid Roth's It's Supernatural! Subscribe for new videos every week and experience God's supernatural presence in yo... A video games channel devoted to: City and Base Building Games, Survival, Tycoon, Strategy and Simulation Games.Here you'll find games including: Transport F... Published on Mar 21, 2020 A Taylor Guitars Road Show is one of our favorite events that happen in the shop each year. However, in this video we're bringing it right to you! The pulse of what's popular on YouTube - United Kingdom. Check out the latest music videos, trailers, comedy clips, and everything else that people are watching right now. Welcome to Timeline - the home of world history. Every week we'll be bringing you one-off documentaries and series from the world's top broadcasters, including the BBC, Channel 4, Discovery and ...
