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.

Property costs money to maintain. And it can only earn as much as someone is willing to pay for it, so if everyone’s poor they won’t pay enough rent to make up for the holding cost.

But they might be able to hope for the selling price in the future to be worth a lot, right? Unless it looks like they have to lock up their money in that investment, doing nothing, for a decade or more while other investments (stocks, bonds, etc.) do much better.

Investing in real estate is tricky, especially at scale. A mistake can cost a huge percentage of the investment, if not wiping out the investment on specific properties.

Or the economy crashes to the point where prices drop and the fed lowers interest rates to try to stimulate the economy, but the economy is so bad that you don’t have a job to be able to qualify for a loan.

People have containerized (like literal shipping containers that comply with ISO 668 and its successors, not just software like Docker) data centers that can operate wherever they can hook up power. Put some antennas or satellite receivers on the outside, and you might be able to literally have services running from a moving vehicle or ship.

The U.S.'s flowchart is pretty complicated, too.

We sell soda in 20oz, 1L, and 2L bottles, or 12 ounce cans. Fountain drinks are measured in ounces.

Wine and liquor are sold in 750ml bottles (and other larger format bottles measured in liters), but individual servings are generally measured in ounces.

Our bullets/ammunition are also mixed, probably because we did standardize our military on NATO standards, but also love our legacy calibers and have a bunch of calibers that aren’t used in the military.

And the U.S. isn’t unique in having a bunch of ways to measure energy (joules, calories, kilowatt hours, therms, BTUs), but we’re somewhat unique in having too many ways to measure power (watts, BTUs/hr, horsepower).

In another thread I was laughing about how U.S. utilities charge for electricity by the kilowatt hour, but charge for piped natural gas by the “therm,” which is 100,000 BTUs. BTUs are the energy required to raise 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit, like a shitty imperial calorie.

Confusingly, most gas appliances are marketed as being a certain number of BTUs per hour, but people often omit the implied “per hour” when talking about them, and will talk of their 12,000 BTU stove burner or 30,000 BTU water heater.

Talking through residential energy use without having a solid command of what unit means what would be confusing.

Harnessing this phenomenon .

Way too many birds.

But also I need to know about the maids a milking, the ladies dancing, the lords a leaping, pipers piping, and the drummers drumming. Like, this is a performance where the humans get paid and get to go home afterward, and not like a slave trade situation, right?

What, a ghost choked you in Switzerland?

Any idiot can build a bridge that stands. It takes an engineer to design a bridge that barely stands.

I agree. Stated another way, imagine the trolley is headed towards 5 people, and you have the power to pull the lever to divert it to a path where there are no people. Even if someone tied those 5 to the tracks with the intent to kill, your failure to save their lives (at no additional cost to others) is widely regarded by most systems of ethics/morality as a moral failing. Yes, the person who tied the tracks bears blame, but so does the person who could’ve easily saved them but chose to let them die.

I love the way you weave in the cultural context, including the culture war parts of modern political and policy debates, the business/corporate trends in entertainment, in your telling of this history. It’s clear you know your stuff, and you’ve helped me understand something new (the influences these slasher films drew from, from Agatha Christie), grounded in stuff I might have already known (the actual movies themselves and the cultural context they were released into, including how people looked at boobs before the internet).

So thank you. This comment is awesome, and you make this place better.

This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.

No, no, the bigots hate people who speak French too

There was. If you map that onto the growth in population you’ll see that tickets per person has been dropping since about 2000.

Michael Scott : I am a victim of a hate crime. Stanley knows what I’m talking about.

Stanley : That’s not what a hate crime is.

Michael Scott : Well, I hated it, a lot, okay.

The whole conversation from the vegan side has been that those proteins and other substances essential to cats are already commonly synthesized for things like animal feed or even human energy drinks. Your own source says it’s impossible without synthetic supplementation, but the deleted comments from that dumpster fire were specifically about synthetic supplementation.

I’m not an expert in this stuff but I can see when comments aren’t actually engaging with arguments from the other side, which is why I think that the vegans have the better argument in this whole saga.

I don’t see why the distance between them isn’t growing at a constant speed.

At any given time t seconds after separation, the boy is 5t north, and the girl is 1t east. The distance between them is defined by the square root of ((5t)^2 + (t)^2 ), or about 5.099t.

In other words, the distance between them is simply a function defined as 5.099t, whose first derivative with respect to time is just 5.099.

All women should be cleaning regularly. Power clean, hang clean, full clean, doesn’t matter.