It’ll push everyone to move their data centers and IT cores overseas.

Even weirder when they start packing coffee in cocaine to throw off the dogs.

On the flip side, do you think a Swiss person living in Asia would be ignorant that 8 is a lucky number?

Elon Musk & Sergei Brin are Gen X, but Bezos, Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Wozniak, and most of the people who built the technology GenX grew up with are Boomers. Zuck is a Millenial, but just barely. You could make a decent start of life as GenX knowing nothing about the technology, but they were still young enough to learn new developments easily.

I’d buy that if he didn’t start his statement with “I live in Switzerland.” 8 may be a lucky number for him, but he absolutely knows what 88 means.

The usual math goes something like

Annuity: $2B paid monthly over 30 years is $5.5M/month; $3.5M after taxes.

Lump sum: $1B, $670M after taxes. Invested in index fund at, say 8%, can be expected to earn $4.5M/month, $3.6M after more taxes, which are lower for capital gains & dividends.

There’s more complicated maths, if you want to model taxes, future values, and variable market returns, but they all say pretty much the same thing. They have to: the annuity works because They put the lump sum into escrow, pay a trustee to manage it well enough to pay the annuity and pay the trustee’s salary. That means the trustee will invest said lump sum (before taxes) in low-risk, low-return assets, take his vig, and pay out the annuity from what’s left.

Remember that Trump lies about everything, often in both directions. Everyone knows this, including his supporters. That gives his supporters the mental freedom to make up whateverthefuck policy positions they like and find proof that they are Trump’s real plan.

Donald Trump is the human version of a Bible. If you’re a Believer, god says he will implement your Desire. If you’re a Heretic, god says he will destroy the world. All with the same words.

Congress makes a big show of restricting their official compensation. Have voted down “cost of living” pay raises every year since 2009. Voted away speaking and publication fees. All these things to “prove” that they hold their positions for civic duty more than money, but the flip side of this is that only people with independent wealth can afford to be in congress. If most of their money comes from investments or unofficial sources, then it can be even easier to funnel money to them - insider trading tips, legislation favorable to their own companies or investments, jobs for their relatives. Benefits structured not to count as compensation or salary, like free travel on “official” business or below-market rent.

It’s a little misleading to describe ‘feeling good,’ including selfless acts of altruism with the phrase “enrich themselves.”

If you get rid of the asshole we elected, you get an asshole we didn’t elect. An asshole we didn’t even have a voice on.

Having a single, central receiver to collect inputs from 5+ A/V sources and deal them back, arbitrarily? to 6 different outputs seems awfully complicated. Something like Jellyfin or mythtv with one or more TV tuners would let you originate all of the TV & streaming signals from your central source to client players - kodi or whatever - in the player rooms. Most of those have at least some control through homeassistant. Kodi on RPis with some basic class D amplifiers in each room, run through the TV, if the room has a TV. Probably couldn’t get synchronized audio in all rooms that way.

Read further. There are two judgements against Jones: one for ~$50M and one for ~$1B. In a normal bankruptcy resolution, the 8 families of the $1B judgement will get 95% of the proceeds, while the 2 families of $50M get 5%. “Sandy Hook families forgoing $750,000” means that those 8 families are effectively giving $750k of their millions to the 2 families, resulting in a more even distribution of compensation across the whole group.

Honestly, it would be most efficient just to grind everyone over 70 into mulch. The years spent slowly siphoning their life savings while they just sit around not being hardcore workers are complete waste. Accelerate the process, transfer the wealth, so the next generation can spend it on new cars and electronic baubles: old people don’t spend enough money, and what they do spend is all government-subsidized healthcare.

/s

They probably do not get the same tax cuts: a “normal” person, making a paltry $250,000/year only reduces taxes by 24% of their giving, where the ultra-rich get 37%.

But the real difference is scale. A million people each giving $100 to their favorite charity is going to distribute that money more-or-less according to the community’s overall priorities. One person giving $100M to their favorite charity has no connection to the broader community and social goals. They supercharge that one thing, which takes attention and resources from everything else.

4 - High-end philanthropy is subsidized by regular taxpayers.

I feel like this is really under-appreciated. Like, Rich Dude decides he wants to donate $100M to…whatever - early childhood education. In the US, he avoids up to $37M taxes, which you can either look at as other taxpayers making $37M matching donation or $37M taken from other society objectives.

To the extent that government is a (marginally) publicly accountable system for funding a society’s competing goals - education, health, defense, research - charity allows the very wealthy not just to bypass the social structure for prioritizing goals, but to force other taxpayers to adopt their personal priorities. Maybe the goal is good, maybe it’s not - the point is that they’re completely unaccountable.

It sounds like he’s not being given a house, but cash that the donor intends OP should use to buy a house.

To me, this sounds like a combination of “you’re going to inherit significant money” and “here’s a strategy to survive on it long-term.” If OP’s family member has made their life as a landlord, then that’s just them passing on their own experience. OP is unhoused, and it’s reasonable to imagine their family member distrusts OP’s financial awareness.

The inheritance may or may not specify how the money is to be used. If OP just gets some lump sum of money, then there’s the financial question of how to extract the greatest quality of life from that money and each strategy has its own ethical question. Would it ethical to buy two homes - even if they’re the same physical building - and rent one out to pay for both? Plus OP’s living expenses? Would it be ethical to invest it all in United Healthcare and live off the dividends? To open a restaurant?

If OP gets a lump sum, there is also the ethical question of whether they are bound to use it in the fashion recommended by their family member.

How do you see this situation as different from splitting rent with a housemate?

To me, the ethical questions lie not in the situation, but in how you handle it. Charge your tenant high enough rent to cover the full mortgage, maintenance, and renovations of the whole building? Sounds sketchy. Charge “market rate” just because that’s what the hedge-fund landlords demand? Sketchy. Find a rent level that accounts for your costs & maintenance of the rented space, an allowance for vacant time, and risk of bad tenants? That’s a great way to help people find housing, without being an actual charity, and make more sustainable use of a big space than living in it all by yourself.

Just being Devil’s Advocate here: Medicare fraud is a thing - docs who prescribe, or claim to have performed, unnecessary treatments, which may be as much as $60B (out of $900B spending, so…7-ish%). Maybe not enough to justify UHC’s 32% denial rate. And nobody seems to source their $60B or $100B fraud estimates - I can only find case evidence for a few hundred million, and those are cases spanning years.

1200 sf townhouse. I can clean it top to bottom under an hour. It takes 5 minutes to mow the lawn. Only time my electric bill tops $100 is August, and gas only in January. No one even thinks about you hosting family gatherings or parties. Don’t have to buy a monster TV so you can see it across the 20’ room.

I suppose, if you really like gardening, or hosting parties, then those could be negatives, but it seems like the main reason to have a big, fancy house is so other people know you can afford a big, fancy house. Personally, they make me uncomfortable, and I would hate to live in one, nevermind the maintenance.

An astonishing number of people can’t distinguish “hatred based on target’s intrinsic, immutable features” from “hatred based on target’s opinions.”