homura1650

Reading the orders, the gender one is much more impactful.

Canceling DEI programs cancels those programs, which just isn't that impactful. Maybe it slows or reverse progress on equality at the population level. But an individual is not going to notice a difference (unless they were explicitly working in administering it). Further, those DEI programs were only for federal agencies, which are going to have a much bigger culture shift from the coming idealougical and loyalty purge. Minorities are still protected by strong anti discrimination laws and the 14th amendment.

The anti trans order, in contrast, declares that trans people don't exist. And the entirety of the federal government must act accordingly. This will have a direct effect on every openly trans person in the country. Further, the legal protections trans people have are based entirely on an interpretation of gender discrimination laws that the current Supreme Court seems unlikely to endorse; and which Trump has directed the Attorney General to not follow.

Even when he is in charge, he can't stop his corruption trial. Netenyahu began testifying mid December, and I believe is still expected to give further testimony. Currently, the trial is on hold due to a surgery, but should resume soon.

Him being PM definitely slows things down, but Israel has no problem trying an active head of state.

The electoral college was entirely a compromise to protect the interest of the slave holding states.

The US has a separate mechanism to prevent run offs. If no one wins the election in the first round, the House of Representatives gets to ignore the election entirely and pick whoever they want as president. In another nod to slave states, this vote is done by state declaration, unlike every other vote the House conducts, where each individual member gets to vote.

If they wanted to have a popular vote for the president, they could have easily done so within the logistical constraints of the time. States still send an electoral delegation to the capital to submit. However, instead of those delegations voting, they simply report their state's election results. Then, the President of the Senate tallies all the state results and announces the result. If no one wins a majority, we fall back on our current stupid procedure in the House of Representatives.

There's been reporting for months that the hostage families have been frustrated with Netenyahu for not getting a hostage release deal, as they think Netenyahu sabotaged perfectly acceptable deals that Hamas has agreed to.

Once you are already angry at him for, at best keeping your loved one trapped for a year longer than necessary, and very possibly killed, then it is a relatively short distance to cross to say that those policies are also war crimes.

That's called self insurance, and it works if you can afford it. The thing about insurance is that it is fundamentally a negative expected value financial product. That negative EV is the premium you pay for the reduced risk. And the risk reduction happens immediately, instead of needing to wait a decade for your self insurance fund to build up.

One way to see this is to look at what the people who most understand insurance do. Insurance companies have a problem if too many people make claims at once. They could self insure against this risk, but that takes a lot of capital that they do not want to spend. Instead, insurance companies go out and buy insurance to cover them in case something happens that results in a lot of claims (this is called reinsurance).

You can actually pull a similar truck with your own insurance. Self insure for the amount that you can handle, then treat your insurance provider like a reinsurance provider to cover large events beyond your capacity. In this case, we call it having a high deductible plan. And you can increase the deductible as your savings increase.

Of course, once you have enough capital to self insure the full value of a house, you need to ask if self insuring is the most profitable use of that capital. You could also pay a premium to insurance companies for the financial service of risk reduction, then invest what would be your self insurance fund in something that you expect to produce higher returns.

Of course, now you have the risk that this other investment might perform poorly and you want to insure against that. In this case, you might invest in something you expect to perform relatively poorly, but would do well in circumstances that makes your other investment do poorly. Of course, figuring this out is difficult, so you can instead pay a premium to an investment fund that specializes in hedging their bets.

When was that house built? What should the current owners do with it? If they sell, someone else needs to buy. Someone is going to be left holding the bag for a decision made decades ago.

And our current approach already indemnifies them, because their flood insurance is provided by the federal government as no private insurer will offer it. Then, when a flood hits, we all pay for it, along with the emergency response during and after the event.

The problem is that people cannot simply get out at scale. The homes themselves are not portable and represent a significant investment that most homeowners cannot afford to lose. An individual can sell, but that requires there being a buyer, so doesn't actually solve the problem.

What is needed here is a government funded relocation program. The government buys houses in eligible areas at market rate (locked in at the time the program starts, as market rate should collapse to 0). Then, the government does nothing, and saves money from not needing to subsidize the insurance market, and need needing to spend as much on disaster response and relief. Given that the disaster relief savings is largely born by the federal government, this program should receive federal funding as well.

Official death tolls are always an undercount. Even after mundane disasters like hurricanes, the death toll gets revised up during the cleanup as more victims are discovered. The disaster in Gaza is still ongoing, so people have more important things to do than count the dead.

In addition to this, the Gaza Health Ministry has taken a deliberately conservative approach of only counting bodies that make it to a hospital and are clearly dead as a direct result of the conflict (e.g, not disease or famine).

The official death count is not a reflection of how many people are dying. It is a reflection of the Gaza Health Ministry's capacity to count the dead.

Women's skirts work just fine for men. You just need to translate between sizing scale, which is not that difficult (although it is annoying unless you are in person and can actually try things on).

Crop tops are much more difficult to buy, as a lot of those really look bad if you don't have breasts.

I think of this as analogous to the movement to get women to wear pants. It's not that we wanted them to present as masculine; it's that we wanted pants to stop being masculine and start being just clothes. Basically all masculine coded attire became androgynous, but almost no feminine code attire did.

It's not like skirts are inherently feminine either. There are plenty of examples across cultures and time of it being perfectly normal for men to wear them.

Just because you have been found guilty does not mean that you cannot subsequently have that finding overturned on appeal. Procedurally, there are a bunch of rules on how that happens; and death row inmates are given more appelet rights than those with life sentences. By having their sentences commuted to life, those would inmates may lose some of their extra appelet writes.

If all you have is a lease, then this is the sunk cost fallacy. Your paying the lease whether you use it or not, so that should not be a factor. Not using it is still cheaper as you do not have the overhead of keeping the space usable (electricity, janitors, etc), and eventually the lease will end. And, you might something else to do with the space that, while not worth the lease, still has non 0 value that you wouldn't get if the space was being used for offices. Besides, at some point the lease would end.

Of course, if your board and executives have investments in commercial real estate, or industries that depend on it (restraunts in commercial areas, supplies of office grade toilet paper, etc), then they have a clear conflict of interest, and may want to sacrifice the interests of the one company to prop up their other investments. In theory, shareholders could sue over this. However, not only would this be very hard to prove, but almost all shareholders have the exact same conflict of interest.