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One of the big questions facing social media giant Twitter ahead of its New York Stock Exchange debut this week is how much money it could actually make for investors.

"We have incurred significant operating losses in the past, and we may not be able to achieve or subsequently maintain profitability," the company writes, in its business prospectus.

Twitter expects revenue growth, but that it will be slow. We've written before on how it's planning on cornering mobile advertising as its main revenue booster. These user numbers a new Pew/Knight study out this week help its argument.

Even though Facebook dwarfs Twitter in the number of users (Facebook's at more than one billion to Twitter's 200 million), the study shows those who consume news on Twitter are younger, better educated and more mobile than Facebook news consumers. That's a huge selling point for Twitter in its bid to lure advertisers. Pew and Knight note:

"Mobile devices are a key point of access for these Twitter news consumers. The vast majority, 85%, get news (of any kind) at least sometimes on mobile devices. That outpaces Facebook news consumers by 20 percentage points; 64% of Facebook news consumers use mobile devices for news. The same is true of 40% of all U.S. adults overall, according to the survey.

Twitter news consumers stand out for being younger and more educated than both the population overall and Facebook news consumers.

Close to half, 45%, of Twitter news consumers are 18-29 years old. That is more than twice that of the population overall (21%) and also outpaces young adults' representation among Facebook news consumers, where 34% are 18-29 years old. Further, just 2% of Twitter news consumers are 65 or older, compared with 18% of the total population and 7% of Facebook news consumers."

Weeks after denying labor's request to give union members access to health law subsidies, the Obama administration is signaling it intends to exempt some union plans from one of the law's substantial taxes.

Buried in rules issued last week is the disclosure that the administration will propose exempting "certain self-insured, self-administered plans" from the law's temporary reinsurance fee in 2015 and 2016.

That's a description that applies to many Taft-Hartley union plans acting as their own insurance company and claims processor, said Edward Fensholt, a senior vice president at Lockton Cos., a large insurance broker.

The fee starts at $63 per insurance plan member next year. Over three years starting in 2014, the tax has been expected to raise $25 billion.

Unions, a key Obama ally, have increasingly criticized the Affordable Care Act as threatening the generous medical plans held by many members.

Eliminating the reinsurance fee was one of several resolutions adopted at the AFL-CIO's September convention, along with giving union plans access to the health law's tax credits for lower-income members.

In September, the White House said the law disallowed health law tax credits for union members on top of their company insurance. Now the administration seems to be moving toward part — but not all — of what labor wants on the reinsurance fee.

While it intends to waive the fee for 2015 and 2016, unions also wanted it scrapped for 2014, when it will be greatest. Taft-Hartley plans are collectively bargained and run jointly by unions and employers to allow workers to move from job to job without losing coverage.

The AFL-CIO didn't respond to a request for comment.

Although it's too early to tell whether the Department of Health and Human Services will give union plans all of what they want on the fee, last week's language "is how HHS often breaks controversial regulatory news," benefits lawyer R. Pepper Crutcher, Jr. wrote last week. It's not known when the administration will put out a new regulation on reinsurance.

Even if the rules sparing unions are adopted, insurance companies and self-insured employers that hire outside claims administrators would still be liable for the fee.

The reinsurance fee made a cameo appearance in the October debt-ceiling negotiations when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reportedly proposed delaying it for everybody until 2015. Republicans objected and the delay was not in the final deal.

The fee, scheduled to kick in next year, would shrink to $42 in 2015 and $26 in 2016, disappearing afterwards. It would help insurers absorb the cost of care for people with pre-existing illness enrolling in plans offered through subsidized marketplaces.

Both unions and business have criticized it as penalizing employer-sponsored health insurance to support plans bought directly from insurers.

The fee "takes money from the pockets of each laborer covered by a health and welfare fund and gives it to for-profit insurance companies," Terry O'Sullivan, president of the Laborers International Union of North America, wrote in a letter to President Barack Obama last summer.

A LIUNA spokesman declined to comment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

On the home front, he captures the silent grandeur and froideur of his parents' apartment overlooking Gramercy Park, decorated with paintings from William Randolph Hearst's excess lots, which they bought at Gimbels department store. He encapsulates his uneasy relationship with his fastidious, prematurely old father with this anecdote: "As a child, I was expected to be old, too. 'Roger,' he said one day, 'that's no way for a 12-year-old boy to behave.' 'Dad,' I said, 'I'm 8.'"

Readers of Making Toast may remember Rosenblatt's antics entertaining his newly bereaved grandchildren as "Boppo the Great." He tells other stories about his delight in flaunting decorum, even when it meant embarrassing his children by dancing in the street. And he's not afraid of embarrassing himself. He recalls standing side by side at the urinals with a Washington Post editor in the mid-1970s and wondering aloud about why the "n" is pronounced in columnist but not column. Rosenblatt writes, "Without looking up, he said, 'Roger, I wish I had your problems.'"

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