They seem to be talking about 18 USC (a)(2) in that quote you're reacting to, which reads:
> (2) corruptly gives, offers, or agrees to give anything of value to any person, with intent to influence or reward an agent of an organization or of a State, local or Indian tribal government, or any agency thereof, in connection with any business, transaction, or series of transactions of such organization, government, or agency involving anything of value of $5,000 or more;
The problem here is that the $5,000 here is NOT the value of the bribe!
It's the value of the funds received from a federal program you're bribing someone that's a part of. So if the garbage collectors, schools, etc. receive more than $5k in funds subject to this statute, it doesn't matter what the bribe is.
That's why they call it "Theft or bribery concerning programs receiving Federal funds" after all. You can read the holding in Sabri to see them spell that out a bit more clearly than the statute does:
> For criminal liability to lie, the statute requires that "the organization, government, or agency receiv[e], in any one year period, benefits in excess of $10,000 under a Federal program involving a grant, contract, subsidy, loan, guarantee, insurance, or other form of Federal assistance." § 666(b). In 2001, the City Council of Minneapolis administered about $29 million in federal funds paid to the city, and in the same period, the MCDA received some $23 million of federal money.
[...]
> The Court does a not-wholly-unconvincing job of tying the broad scope of § 666(a)(2) to a federal interest in federal funds and programs. See ante, at 605-606. But simply noting that "[m]oney is fungible," ante, at 606, for instance, does not explain how there could be any federal interest in "prosecut[ing] a bribe paid to a city's meat inspector in connection with a substantial transaction just because the city's parks department had received a federal grant of $10,000," United States v. Santopietro, 166 F. 3d 88, 93 (CA2 1999).
Incidentally, those examples they used seem to have come from hypothetical scenarios raised during oral argument. You can read a bit more here in the transcript of the oral arguments:
I'd guess that it speaks to the "knew charges were coming" bit to support that they were specifically fleeing the law and not disappearing to escape a bookie or an annoying family member or something
> I remember having to hustle to get from one end of campus to the other in those 10 minutes
Yeah, personally I read it less as 50 minutes being some biological limit of human attention and more as once you go over people start thinking about how much longer you're going to be, how long it'll take to get to their class, weighing missing the end of this talk vs the start of the next one vs skipping their bathroom break/sprinting. Plus the added the distraction of people who have reached their limit getting up and squeezing their way past to leave.
Couldn't you just
1. Draw an arbitrary line through the cake
2. Set each person's valuation of a point on the line equal to their valuation of the cross section throgh that point
3. Use the algorithm to cut the 1D pseudocake
4. Make the corresponding cross sectional cuts to the real cake
Actually for round cakes you could even make normal (wedge-shaped) pieces by re-parameterizing distance along the line as angle and cross sections as infinitesimal wedges.
Edit: And for the rectangular cake you could slice the cake up along one axis and line those pieces up end-to-end first so that the cross sections would have a reasonable width instead of having slices as wide as the whole cake
Making multiple cuts along a line doesn't seem optimal. Remember that these slices of 3D cake can be of any shape. You can imagine different people liking different fillings or different toppings on the cake.
>Thank God my son was fine, but the comment about the dead bull intrigued me. We didn't own a bull. Where was he? How did the bull die? And why was he telling me about it?
>Then he said, "The car is damaged but operable." All right. He had gotten into some type of accident, the car wasn't a total loss, and there was a dead bull (still a great puzzle).
The buyer expects to derive profits from arbitrage to the existing market value. If Nike shut down the moment you bought the shoes the profits would still be realized, because they don't require any effort on Nike's part.
