Oh, don’t be fooled, they take some cuts out of the raw ticket sales too, not directly taxed, but something like 50+% of sales doesn’t go to the jackpot. Capitalism loves to take a cut everywhere it can, and it has been allowed to just run completely rampant here.

I wouldn’t say taxes in general are lower everywhere here, that was just the income tax comparison, there’s several other forms of taxes to pay, everywhere they can take a cut, except where the rich can bribe them not too of course.

I didn’t actually go do the math on it, looks like it’s accurately 37% to 50% (or thereabouts), I saw several EU countries listed around 53%-57%, so it can be pretty measurable, I guess.

Wendy’s is falling off a quality cliff unfortunately, while also driving up prices. Used to go there a lot, haven’t been in a while.

Gifts are from us, to parents/grandparents individually, everyone else as a couple if possible, else single.

A few of topics to cover here to explain it all: 1. Lottery Annuities, 2. Taxation 3. Wealth based Tax Avoidance.

For a lottery grand prize, the actual payout of the total is done via a multiple (30 in this case) payment yearly annuity, usually one that increases in size by a fixed amount (5% for this), where the total face value of the payments equals the winnings. If the winner took the annuity payout, they’d get like $25M today and more every year for 29 more years until they got about $100M, which would equal the jackpot. Alternatively, the lottery offers a “lump sum” payment, based on the value of the annuity (basically what it would cost today for someone to buy that stream of payments), which will be like half of the jackpot face value due to how compound interest works.

For taxes, any lottery payment is income and will be taxed accordingly by relevant entities, this will further reduce the take home amount by another 40%-60%.

For billionaires, they have wealth in the form of investment in the billions, not typically income. There are lots of loopholes here due to tax code complexity, but the 2 common examples are: long term investment tax and loans. If you’ve held any stock for at least a year, you only need to pay a reduced tax amount (this exists to incentivize stable participation in the stock market). Money you received from a loan is not income and is not taxed, lenders will allow you to secure your loan with investment holdings. There might be some additional trickery related to the cost basis used for payments of stock as compensation, I’m not looking into it. Basically, you can combine these into a process where you make large purchases or even day to day based on money from loans, and only pay those off using long-term investments, paying less income tax on your profit from them, which effectively reduces your tax burden. With massive holdings, you can turbo charge this, into what is essentially a ponzi scheme of loans, assuming interest on your investments is better than your loans (which will be lower because of your low risk to default).

Say you have $1B in mixed assets ($700M in long-term assets, $150M in each of short-term assets and cash), you want to buy a $100M house. You basically have 4 choices. Choice 1, pay with cash, you already paid taxes on it at whatever rate you did, but now it can’t earn you money by being invested. Choice 2, sell short-term holdings, you’ll pay taxes on your profits for this year as ordinary income, it also cannot earn more interest. Choice 3, sell long-term holdings, you pay reduced taxes on your profits for this year, it cannot earn more interest. Choice 4, purchase using a loan secured by your stock, you pay no taxes, you can continue to invest all your money which will earn more than the interest payments will cost on the loan. 4b, you take out loans to pay for your other loans, it’s basically always more profitable to keep your money invested and you never pay full tax on investment income if you need to use it.

Say you earn 7% interest in the stock market and loans charge 3.5% interest, a loan to buy the house, you take out 2 lines of credit (loans), you use the lines of credit to pay for the mortgage payments and each line of credit to make minimum payments on the other, and your investments appreciate. Averaged out, you “earn” 7M from your investments you didn’t sell, and accrue only about 3.5M or so additional debt, and pay no taxes on any of it. Each year, this repeats with larger numbers and profit growing faster than debt, you bought a house, you actually paid nothing, people will keep giving you loans so long as you keep having much more holdings than debt, ad infinum. This works until the stock market cracks in half and you earn less interest than debt accrued, but even then you just need to sell enough stock to max minimum payments, and only pay lower taxes on the profits until the market turns around. That’s more or less the extreme example.

More or less the same reason jury nullification exists, just concentrated on executive leadership. The problem isn’t that it exists, the problem is the bribery and ethical issues. Theoretically, if the executive is abusing the power, the legislature is supposed to remove them, but since we no longer operate in a system where that will happen… Here we are.

Sesame Street is great for exposure to a variety of types of people and some cultures. PBS in general is pretty good for that.

Bluey is fun for parents and kids, though it can give kids some high expectations from their parents.

Numberblocks is a good math concepts/counting show.

Storybots is a good learning about the world kind of show.

Paw Patrol has some life lesson kinds of things, but has more action/adventure stuff.

Aged like 21, working in a gas station convenience store register, man walks in, seems homeless and wasted, asked me to call 911 for him, says they’ll know him. Obviously not covered in the manual, but I figure that if someone asks you to call, you call.

I call, talking to the operator trying to explain… The dude just goes down like a sack of potatoes, whacks the top of his head on the counter, knocks over a couple of displays, and starts twitching on the floor. The operator got ALOT more compliant, EMTs picked the guy up (he was a frequent flier), he had a like 3in bump on his forehead that looked like a horn.

I cleaned up the store, trashed the food he damaged, bleached all the other stuff. Weird day.

CPAP, comes with a cell chip in it to relay data for the Dr to monitor/access. Cell chip stops working after 5 years.

Edit: Realized this could use more clarity. The cell plan for the chip expires after 5 years and cannot be renewed, meaning the entirely functional machine needs to be replaced or the Dr can’t properly monitor necessary vitals.

I just want to see some more exceptionalism from Flute Guy.

This guy was working for them and did all this before the standards got lowered and the expectations for intimidation and violence were increased, so I’m not sure I can even imagine the sheer horrors currently happening that we only might find out in a few years.

The point of games is to have fun, “cheats” are essentially just difficulty options.

Honestly, he’d probably better than like 80+% of the field we’ve had in the last 3 elections or will have if there is another one.

Once Upon a Galaxy has been my default game since I first played it.

It’s an asynchronous alternating activation autobattler (like Arcane Rush, or Storybook Brawl/Hearthstone Battlegrounds but you play against ghosts). Games take about 10-15 minutes.

It’s largely public domain fantasy themed, but has been expanding into the “legally distinct” cultural references as they add content, basically every captain/unit/treasure is a reference.

The shop mechanic is simplified, there’s no currency, you just get a set of choices, and can pick 1. You get two shops per round by default, lots of ways to get extra.

Asynchronous play means that you face challenging opponents that naturally evolve with the meta game but you can also take time to make thoughtful decisions.

The draft pool for the shop has a large base pool that you add to by selecting a custom sebset from a second large pool as your captain’s deck. The progression is through unlocking cards for each captain’s secondary pool, and unlocking new captains. You can naturally earn all cards through play, most captains are free, new captains are paywalled for a limited time.

Monetization is through 3 paths: cosmetics, acceleration of card unlocks, access to paywalled captains. I haven’t found it to be particularly exploitative or negative feeling.

My only gripe is minor, that it doesn’t have mid-run save/resume, but that is on their road map.

There is essentially no story, if that matters to you.

If it’s not obvious, I’m really enthusiastic about this game. I’m not affiliated/sponsored in any way. Happy to answer any questions.

It sounds very infrastructure/trade based than politics, so I’d stay away from nation/country terms. Regional Planning would be a generic term for the infrastructure piece, could use Commerce if trade is important. >

I’ve come to view tolerance not as a default position, but rather as a contract which people are defaulted into, if you’re breaking it by refusing to be bound by it, you’re no longer protected by it either.

I’ll leave guilt up to the jury, but people really need to read the article, though it could really use more details. There’s a possibility of this actually being a nothing burger. Their family business received a COVID relief payment from FEMA, article says it was for $5M too much (doesn’t say if it was more than they requested or just more than FEMA meant to send), portions of that money were paid to family members (unclear if they worked at the family business) and those family members also donated to her campaign (timeline is unclear, obviously faster movement would be more suspicious, but if these are well separated, not as much).

I’m going to steal this from my favorite author, the power to arrive late to things, and it frequently happens even if you aren’t trying to.

Bonus power: the power to get an excessive amount of water on the floor when washing dishes.

There are many more, it’s a fun series.

Does the length of the bill matter?

Maybe the elected representatives should read an entire bill before they vote on passing it…