**sad trumpet

If you have a pension worth $1 mil, that trickles in over time, you sell it for $600,000 lump sum and just get pension payments deposited into an account of their choosing. You got some immediate cash. They get more money over time.

I hope Israel is a worth it.

It isn’t. Genocide killed any chances there. They became what they feared most.

Can you sell your pension to JG Wentworth types?

Can? Yes. Will? Doubtful.

99M in a trust fund for me, my immediate family, extended family and friends. We would live relatively modest and give generously.

901M would go to a wide assortment of charities and causes:

• Fund my local foodbank for the next 50 years. Perhaps even a dynasty trust.
• Tackle youth unemployment and unmet community needs through investing in non-market solutions. E.g. build greenhouses with raised beds in urban brownfield and greenfield property, hire local people to grow resilient local foods and donate them throughout the community. Some local old age homes had some complaints about food quality and budget and they wanted things like fresh ripe tomatoes. I’d given them 3 seasons worth for free and pay for the equipment, labour, insurance out of pocket. Local youth could get high school credits, jobs not just gardening, but designing and improve closed ag systems, plumbing, deep winter greenhouse design and engineering, logistics, everything. Good experience and spending money. Maybe turn into a market career for some.

Build a few multiplexes as high quality PassiveHousePlus and operate as self funded charity built and operated using only local labour for womans & homeless shelters

I have a few friends in social services and I guarenfuckentee a shitload of orphans and foster kids and poor kids supervised by children services would get new toys, clothes, shoes, bedding, pillows, christmas presents from a bad ass santa, art supplies, comic books, tuition, books, enrichment activity fees and more. Some have this through foster parents and public systems. Way too many don’t.

I can’t help everyone and even this money won’t last long, but Imma go out swinging hard.

True, but none of us have actually been tested. How many of us could taste real power and walk away?

The closest proxy is maybe lottery winners. Some invest, some fall flat on spending orgies. Almost none walk away.

A low bar to be sure,but it could be worse.

What kind of sammich?

“Weighs”. A curious term.

The WSJ sanewashing this administration because the Pentagon follows the commander in chief and we know Trump neither weighs, ponders or considers shit.

He makes up random bullshit on the fly and the Pentagon blindly obeys. If they are lucky, they get to react as to how to minimize the inevitable fallout of supremely stupid decisions in the hopes they can survive long enough to make it to to retirement.

The smarter Pentagon officials are probably googling “US military pension lump sum payouts” along with “Renouncing US citizenship” and “Warm, cheap places to retire to.”

It happened on earth?

“it should be the object of every well-governed commonwealth to make the state rich and keep individual citizens poor”

Considering that “state” here means him and his buddies, it translates into modern english as “Fuck you, I’ve got mine”.

Can’t get more conservative than that.

Trump, doing more to fight climate change than anyone ever thought possible.

Regrets there is blowback. When you are constantly on the wrong side of history, maybe the hollow apologies aren’t enough and institutional change is required.

Few are pleased with the state of policing. Corruption, egregious breeches of ostensible policing standards leave few “proud” of our police. This is what they will admit., but consider the source, and trustworthiness.

It’s not like the cops had a good reputation.

ACAB. My ability to actually list the long line of egregious abuses pales compared to the monumentality of the task. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Fair point. But how to distinguish it from unpopularity? If the “toxic” waste is disingenuous, bad faith, bot based flooding, we have the tools to suppress it. If something is just genuinely unpopular, you have to be careful calling it an echo-chamber. Lots of folks think toxic of anything that disagrees with their obviously superior opinions.

There is no perfect answer. Garbage in, garbage out. Welcome to humanity.

Enter deglobalization.

Agree completely. My original terse comment was based on this very assumption. Having read more of OPs comments, I think the latter is more apt.

There is more to it I think. In a masters level course I took, our Instructor was a nearly retired Ph.D in Taxation. He had spent a lifetime in the halls of corporate power as an expert, conducting research and giving policy advice to corporations, governments and institutions.

Among the friendly banter during breaks, some interesting conversations came up about ethics in business. He interjected and offered an explicit personal opinion. He was very clear he was speaking as a person eating his lunch, not as our instructor and in no way does what he was about to say reflect the course material in any way:

If you want to understand how corporations’ executives and more importantly, how Boards of Directors, and a lot of high level civil servants and political actors really measure performance under these ethical scenarios, read Machiavelli’s “The Prince”. It explains everything.

I read it the next day. Then I went on to read Xenophon’s “The Education of Cyrus” because Machiavelli referred to it in the book.

Edit: Having read a few more of OPs responses, I think OPs subject is just saying they agree with/admire Machiavelli’s The Prince, and to the point of my story, so do a LOT of powerful people. You know, the types who tend to score high on the DSM’s dark triad and run global corporations.

Ah. So they read The Prince, and they admire the self-centered, amoral pursuit of political power.

We call those people conservative or fascist, depending on the degree of ideological rigour and if any off flavours are present.

To answer your question, I consider the dish ruined. It should be discarded and you should try anew from scratch.

I see. Good points all around. But I would not consider than an echochamber. That is just a diversity of respondants, many of which are poor quality and low effort.

Some because they are low intellect. Some are children. Some are edgelords and shitposters just trying to provoke for shits and giggles. Some just find the questions so obviously out of whack, that they presume OP to be a shitposter, and respond in kind. Lots of reasons, similar results. I noted a few recent ask lemmy questions where the questions were so malformed, people couldn’t tell it it was a bot, esl, neurodiversity etc and made jokes about op. That’s a case of garbage in/garbage out. While not cool, if you can’t be bothered to make a quality question, you can’t insist on a quality answer.

For reference: I go with the standard def:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)

That which reinforces bias from innapropriate confirmation or unduly limits discussion of counter views.