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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

A funny one was I was visiting my parents for the holidays. They have the news on and it is talking about that $2T funding cuts. It shows a bunch of examples with like $50m to this, $500k to that, and then a random $10k to "youth break dancing." And I'm like "why is that there? Seems like rage bait. Why not list more big ticket items? It's $2T, $10k is a nothing at that scale." You guessed right, this started a fight. I wasn't even trying to say that the thing should be funded (though I have no issues. Sounds like just a recreational program. Who cares? It's not even "pennies").

A lesson I continually fail to learn is that it isn't about the actual things. Information is a weapon to many people. Not a thing to chase, to uncover, to discover, but a thing that is concrete and certain. I still fear the man that "knows", since all I can be certain of is that he knows nothing.

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That's because TV news is an entertainment program similar to a reality TV show. It's designed to enrage you with terrible news even when the reality is quite different and things are not that dire. When I realized it I stopped watching it.

I've also stopped watching TV entirelly when they shutdown analog TV as that was a nice natural ending of the traditional TV. Continuing required a repeated action (buying MPEG2 tuners when it was obvious that newer codecs will be used in a few years) and it was very easy to just do nothing instead.

>and then a random $10k to "youth break dancing." And I'm like "why is that there? Seems like rage bait.

This, but also the implication is that if they'll waste $10k on break dancing, then they must be wasting similar amounts on thousands of other programs and the leave it for the reader to imagine what those might be and get angry about whatever they made up in their mind.

  > then they must be wasting similar amounts on thousands of other programs

See my response here. You're greatly underestimating how much a trillion is. Probably a million times more than you think I'm implying.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42653038

No, I'm not underestimating it, I'm explaining how other people think.

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".

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.

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.

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.

Yes it can be hard to convey numbers to the general public. Orders of magnitude are unintuitive unless STEM trained.

I'm not sure that's even enough. I have a physics degree and all I've learned is that my stupid brain can't understand those numbers except through equations and relations. I think this is the best you can get.

Money is also very weird since it compounds. Both large wealth and government money are completely different classes, as well as different from each other. People try to think of both those versions of money in relation to how they use money themselves. Which just leads to misunderstandings.

Sounds to me like you were focusing on the (negligible) impact, while they were upset on principle?

Correct. But it was impossible to convince them that the premise of the complaint was different from what they wanted to hear. Tribalism makes people want to fight.

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