Word: yorke
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...game if it was so strong and steady? We deluded ourselves into thinking we were all smarter than the others. When it came to the investment game, we had it figured. And what was the game anyway? The way it was vaguely described to us was that the "New York people" had a system whereby they placed a series of instant trades - at once with futures, currencies and stocks - and out of this magic recipe fell a tiny 1% guaranteed, no-risk profit for the group. You do that 20 times a year, take away management fees and, voil...
Though a Boston businessman named Charles Ponzi was the scam's namesake, he wasn't its original practitioner. According to Mitchell Zuckoff, a Ponzi biographer, the reigning king of the "rob Peter to pay Paul" scam was a New York grifter named William Miller, who bilked investors out of $1 million - nearly $25 million in today's dollars - in 1899. After drumming up interest by claiming to have an inside window into the way profitable companies operated, Miller - who earned the nickname "520 percent" due to the astonishing rate of return he promised investors over the course of a year...
Michael Mills, a veteran health inspector in New York City, helps create a map of the city you won't find in any guidebook: a rat map. That's right, a map of the New York neighborhoods that rodent populations call home...
Today, rodent complaints by residents from all over New York are electronically pinpointed on the city's computerized rat map, which allows inspectors to track complaints and hot spots over time and determine how well rat-control efforts are working. The results, after just one year, should be music to the ears of most New Yorkers: when the pilot study began in the Bronx, inspectors found active rat signs on 3,100 of the borough's 39,000 properties. Preliminary results now show that 1,250 of those properties are rat-free. That's a 40% drop-off in infestations...
...only species of rat (of the four-legged variety, anyway) that lives in New York City is the Rattus norvegicus, also known as the Norway rat or the brown rat. Nobody knows exactly how many live here, but everyone agrees that the population has exploded in recent years - thanks to warmer winters, ever more wasteful food habits and, in part, the city's crippling fiscal problems in the 1970s...