In 2024.

Helpfully highlighting the baseline so that we can see how much it changes over time.

The merits of lump sum versus annuity aside, the point is that the headline number comes from a naive total of how many payments are made in the annuity option. So when it’s listed as a $2 billion jackpot, it’s actually worth something closer to half of that as a lump sum.

That wouldn’t work to reduce lottery taxes. The lottery itself isn’t return on investment in stocks or whatever, and can’t be held indefinitely the way an appreciating stock can.

I think you’re relying too heavily on your anecdotal experience here. Maybe you’ve never seen a gun fired in anger, but there are about 13,000 gun homicides per year.

Plus, the nature of gatherings mean that a very small number of events can have many witnesses, especially if defined to include people who heard gunshots.

Take the most extreme example, the 2017 Vegas shooting, the single worst mass shooting event in American history. There were people killed and injured in the event. Under anyone’s definition that was a mass shooting.

There were 22,000 attendees at that music festival. How many staff, crew, contractors, vendors, performance artists and their own staffs? How many cops and first responders were there? How many were in the 3200-room hotel and casino who had to be evacuated during the response? How many people heard gunshots in the open air, or saw muzzle flashes from the hotel room? 50,000?

Same with the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting. Lots of people were within hearing range of the shots.

These types of events have a lot of people present. If 4 people are dying from a shooting, what’s the average number of people wounded? How many are present?

The math is somewhat counterintuitive, and can explain a lot of the high number.

People generally aren’t sentenced to the maximum penalty for a crime, so it’s not very useful to compare the maximum potential sentence for a charged crime versus the actual sentence received after conviction on another crime. The Indianapolis hit and run carried potential penalties of more than 15 years. This DVD guy will probably get less than 5.

You’re still too narrowly focused.

The courts can and still do order the executive branch to follow the law, and undo unlawful actions, and order them to follow the law into the future. That’s the whole reason why at any given time there are thousands of lawsuits against the government under the Administrative Procedure Act, and the type of lawsuit being brought against Trump’s new policies.

If he ignores court orders, that’s a constitutional crisis, but it also really fucks up his chain of command. Elon Musk can’t fire thousands of people or freeze thousands of contracts, he has to direct the thousands of people who actually control those things to do the paperwork to do that, and those individual civil servants won’t violate court orders.

The lawsuits are important, and people need to not roll over and just accept Trump’s illegal actions.

This is a misconception that should stop.

The Supreme Court ruled that the executive branch can’t bring criminal charges against someone for acts that were done as President.

Here’s what that doesn’t stop:

• Criminal cases against the former president for non-official acts.
• Civil cases against the former president for acts, whether official or non-official.
• Criminal charges against anyone else who wasn’t literally the president
• Civil cases against the government, its agencies, its officers, or its employees.

The Supreme Court fucked up when it said prosecutors can’t use official acts as evidence relating to unofficial acts, which basically made it impossible to prosecute a whole bunch of types of crimes.

But what it doesn’t do is stop people from suing the government, here and now, for breaking the law, or stop the courts from ordering the government to comply with the law.

And the scope of immunity covers only the President personally. Any other adviser, employee, or officer can still be prosecuted for breaking the law, including following the President’s illegal orders.

Part of the Trump strategy right now is to demoralize the opposition and make us believe that he actually has all the power. He doesn’t, at least not yet. We shouldn’t make it easy for him by assuming that he can break the law with impunity, and instead we should make sure we continue to do everything in our power to hold him and everyone who helps implement his agenda accountable.

Executive Orders aren’t unconstitutional on their own.

The president can do meaningless gestures in an Executive Order, like declare a happy birthday to a foreign head of state or something, and that’s not unconstitutional.

The president can also exercise the inherent constitutional powers of the office through executive order, too: grant a military medal to somebody, tell executive branch employees that they have Christmas Eve off, provide for a system of classifying state secrets, etc. Those might have real effects, but so long as it’s the exercise of power that the presidency actually has, there’s nothing unconstitutional about that.

Then the president can also exercise the powers given by Congress: tell the EPA to start a rulemaking process, declare a public health emergency and invoke some of the powers under the procedures previously defined by Congress, etc. If the powers involved were granted by Congress, and the power itself was not unconstitutional, then there’s no problem there.

The big issue is that a lot of people misunderstand when an executive order is performative and has no legal effect, or when an executive order merely directs an agency to do something with legal effect. That agency’s actions need to be evaluated for legality, but the executive order itself does nothing, except communicates the president’s preferences to that agency in a public way. The president could just as easily call up that agency head by phone and say the same thing, and wouldn’t even need to publish that order.

It’s not the procedure that’s unconstitutional. It’s the actual contents and substance of the orders that are probably illegal.

Well, I wouldn’t assume that the local vendors and farmers are less likely to be supporting Trump.

That’s why it’s our responsibility as consumers to align their shareholder interests to doing the right fucking thing. Boycotts and other consumer action are part of their calculations on what the shareholder interests are, so a large population of informed consumers who vote their conscience with their wallet will provide pressure to do the right thing.

You can buy a house for cheap when a fire is threatening it, and hope to put out the fire before it gets destroyed. That’s how you can profit from a fire.

But if it’s just buying the ashes, that’s not actually a good investment strategy. The price has dropped because the thing truly did become less valuable.

Too many people can’t seem to see the difference between the first category and the second.

His own class is going to betray him because he is the dumbest motherfucker alive.

The billionaires will regret giving him power, because they’re subtly giving up their own levers of influence over him.

When you could buy a politician or an election, you held some sway over those politicians in those seats. When you pay lobbyists who will do the work of writing specific regulations that help you, and then have them try to get those regulations actually enacted, you had influence over how the government could wield power over you.

But the Trump movement has been about consolidation of power in one man, who doesn’t feel constrained by laws, or by other politicians. The billionaires are down to a single tool: trying to pay off one man, who doesn’t keep his word.

The question becomes, at what point does it go from money buying power, versus power buying money? It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one for those who currently have money and who want to derive power from that.

Trump and Elon want to make it so that they can singlehandedly destroy any business that doesn’t bend the knee. At the same time, they want to be able to shape the rules in an arbitrary way to only help those they like, and hurt those they don’t. They’re not quite there yet, and I’d say that the rich still have some power independent of the government. But the plan for those in charge is to consolidate power as quickly as they can, to where that’s no longer true.

There’s a substantial chance that this goes down the same way that scene in The Dark Knight Rises, where the financial backers who enabled Bane’s movement insist that they should still have influence over that movement, once it takes power.

Or if you actually want a historical parallel, the oligarchs who funded the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, only to find themselves in concentration camps themselves.

You heard the man, fire any employee and expel any student who participated in the January 6 insurrection.

Don’t mistake malice for incompetence, or vice versa.

I’d also add not to mistake inadvertence for planned action, or vice versa.

Let’s not forget, this was the administration that named the wrong official as acting FBI director and, rather than fixing their mistake, just went with it and let that guy run things for a few weeks.

It could be that they want to tank the markets so that their people can buy things for cheap. But I also wouldn’t trust their competence or planning to do it in a way that the cheap thing recovers in value.

People make the comparison to Crassus’s fire brigade, where he’d buy homes on the cheap that were already on fire, then use the brigade to put the fire out. But imagine someone who tries to do this with an incompetent fire brigade, where they buy houses on fire and then fail to contain the fires, so that they end up losing even more. That analogy might be more on point with this administration.

May as well connect the walls into row housing and drop the price 100k.

Sorry, best I can offer is row housing that is $100k more expensive.

Wondermark did a version of this joke that’s pretty good.

It’s low key in the sense that Trump seems to have been prepared to disobey the order, but it never took effect. The order was “pay people what you owe them by Wednesday at 11:59pm,” and the Trump admin got an order from the Supreme Court pausing that requirement until further notice.

What’s notable is that Trump’s lawyer said “yes we know we have to comply with court orders but this one is literally impossible to comply with in time,” which is the type of position that makes a token gesture towards complying, while also showing that they weren’t going to comply in time.

Andrew Jackson’s statement that he would have refused to have the executive branch enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling was dangerous, but it ended up not mattering in practice. The losing party in that case was the State of Georgia, and Georgia ended up complying with the court orders.

If Trump starts ordering the executive branch to disobey court orders, it may set up a crisis, and it might be one that he doesn’t win. His own loyalists appointed to the heads of the departments and agencies might listen to him, but the actual rank and file of who needs to implement the orders could end up in open revolt. After all, even the military has it ingrained that one only needs to obey lawful orders, not unlawful ones.

I think you’re missing the point of this criticism.

People buy stuff, and then they use it. If they don’t use less, they won’t buy less, even if there’s a specific day where they choose not to buy anything. That day’s avoided purchases just get moved to another day, and the seller doesn’t feel any effect.

A real boycott takes money that would’ve been spent on a specific seller and takes it away forever. It’s a shift in purchase behavior to a competitor, or a shift in consumption behavior to not need to purchase that thing anymore.

As an extreme example, someone who boycotts Tesla every day for 5 years but still buys a Tesla once every 5 years is not effectively boycotting Tesla, even if that boycott covers 1825 days in a row.

Same with people who normally grocery shop on Friday, who shift their purchases to Saturday.

I would advocate for boycotting specific companies instead, and steering that money you would’ve spent to someone else (even a charity, so as to reduce one’s own consumption). The boycotts need to shift recipients of the money, not dates of when that money changes hands.

To expand further on what you’re saying, the problem with the linked article’s mathematical/statistical analysis is that it uses a slightly more sophisticated version of misleadingly using “average”/mean in a context where median would be more appropriate.

Specifically, they talk about the spending of the top 10% in the aggregate, and point to the threshold of when a household tips into that top decile. Well, that aggregated number is itself heavily skewed towards the higher end of that spectrum, where the people in the 99th percentile are contributing a lot more weight than those in the 90th.

Here are the cutoffs for income thresholds to hit each percentile at or above 90:

90: $235k
91: $246k
92: $260k
93: $275k
94: $295k
95: $316k
96: $348k
97: $391k
98: $461k
99: $632k

Note that this doesn’t even get into the 0.5% or 0.1%, which skew things even further. Even without that level of granularity, you can see that the median in this group is about $305k while the mean is closer to $350k.

When you include the billionaires, the difference skews even further.

That’s the math error at the center of this thesis. The facts reported might be true, but in a way that groups things together misleadingly.