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How many such "pennies" projects were there? It could be that your parents understand that you can waste a lot of money throwing dollar bills out of the window.

How many such "pennies" projects were there? It could be that your parents understand that you can waste a lot of money throwing dollar bills out of the window. Most of the time these bills are full of waste such that the sum total of all such projects can equal the threshold of what you might think of as "real money".

godelski 2y ago
I think you are failing to understand how much $2T actually is. That's 200m things you'd need to add up. That's nearly the population of America. It's more than the population of California, Texas, Florida, and New York combined. More than the number of square miles in California. If you started at the southern border of California, you could place a $10 bill side by side (the short side!) while traveling north you'd get more than half way through Oregon! [0] That's the number of things you need to add up, which is still far short of $2T I cannot express how large of sum of money this is. Only that if you think you understand you're wrong (I do not understand). If you are indeed correct and a large portion of the money is composed of things costing under $1m then we're seriously SERIOUSLY fucked. Because a trillion is a million million. As with most things, I have extremely high confidence that follows a power distribution (go look up Pareto). So there's going to be thousands of things more than $100m in cost. So I'm extremely confident that if you're picking 10 examples to show on screen and of any single one of those values is under $10m then you're either grossly incompetent or showing rage bait. Because even $10m is chump change when we're talking about these numbers. You certainly aren't providing any meaningful communication to your viewers. At best you're accidentally grossly misrepresenting the problem. While I'm a fan of Hanlon's Razor, extreme incompetence in your domain of expertise is no different from malice. [0] a bill is 156mm x 66.3mm. California is 1,220km long. 1220000/0.063=19,365,079. Oregon is 580km long. $2T is so much fucking money you could place $100 bills side by side along the length of California and if you did this a thousand times you'd be $63.5bn shy of $2T. If you did it 1033 times you still be $1.5bn short.
- dinkumthinkum 2y ago
  I don't need to look up the Pareto Principle and I am well aware of the scale of 2 trillion dollars. I don't need a bunch of condescending examples about, thanks. As far as journalism goes, I call it a good thing to highlight to tax-payers wasteful spending and perhaps other people think responsible spending by the government is a good thing will as well. This is quite common the numbers are not always at the scale of trillions. Sometimes, you find a city, perhaps like Chicago, wants to raise a billion dollar property tax, but has spent 400 million dollars on supporting illegal immigration, largely to one corporation, for example.
  - godelski 2y ago
    Just because I'm giving examples does not mean they are condescending. I am helping put into terms the scale of these numbers. That even my examples are not something you can actually conceptualize. Honestly, I can't even imagine a dollar side by side spanning a few city blocks. I agree there's massive amounts of wasteful programs at that scale. But massive amounts of them gets you nowhere close to the actual number. That's the point.

godelski 2y ago

I think you are failing to understand how much $2T actually is. That's 200m things you'd need to add up. That's nearly the population of America. It's more than the population of California, Texas, Florida, and New York combined. More than the number of square miles in California. If you started at the southern border of California, you could place a $10 bill side by side (the short side!) while traveling north you'd get more than half way through Oregon! [0] That's the number of things you need to add up, which is still far short of $2T I cannot express how large of sum of money this is. Only that if you think you understand you're wrong (I do not understand). If you are indeed correct and a large portion of the money is composed of things costing under $1m then we're seriously SERIOUSLY fucked. Because a trillion is a million million. As with most things, I have extremely high confidence that follows a power distribution (go look up Pareto). So there's going to be thousands of things more than $100m in cost. So I'm extremely confident that if you're picking 10 examples to show on screen and of any single one of those values is under $10m then you're either grossly incompetent or showing rage bait. Because even $10m is chump change when we're talking about these numbers. You certainly aren't providing any meaningful communication to your viewers. At best you're accidentally grossly misrepresenting the problem. While I'm a fan of Hanlon's Razor, extreme incompetence in your domain of expertise is no different from malice. [0] a bill is 156mm x 66.3mm. California is 1,220km long. 1220000/0.063=19,365,079. Oregon is 580km long. $2T is so much fucking money you could place $100 bills side by side along the length of California and if you did this a thousand times you'd be $63.5bn shy of $2T. If you did it 1033 times you still be $1.5bn short.

dinkumthinkum 2y ago
I don't need to look up the Pareto Principle and I am well aware of the scale of 2 trillion dollars. I don't need a bunch of condescending examples about, thanks. As far as journalism goes, I call it a good thing to highlight to tax-payers wasteful spending and perhaps other people think responsible spending by the government is a good thing will as well. This is quite common the numbers are not always at the scale of trillions. Sometimes, you find a city, perhaps like Chicago, wants to raise a billion dollar property tax, but has spent 400 million dollars on supporting illegal immigration, largely to one corporation, for example.
- godelski 2y ago
  Just because I'm giving examples does not mean they are condescending. I am helping put into terms the scale of these numbers. That even my examples are not something you can actually conceptualize. Honestly, I can't even imagine a dollar side by side spanning a few city blocks. I agree there's massive amounts of wasteful programs at that scale. But massive amounts of them gets you nowhere close to the actual number. That's the point.