ricecake

My eyes rolled so hard they literally flew out of my head and knocked a wall off the back of my house when I saw your example to justify "hundreds of billions of dollars of waste" was an opinion piece on the $500 toilet seat from 1986.
Spoiler alert: if you read the next few years of news it's revealed that those stories are almost uniformly exaggerations and misrepresentations driven by Reagan era people who wanted to starve the beast.

Political lies drummed up to justify cutting vital services under the pretenses of "fighting waste".

You can do whatever you want. I won't be caught dead cheering for a fascist who wants to rollback civil rights just to give him a fair shot in case he makes a prudent budget cut. Which he won't, because his platform has openly covered that they want to cut education, healthcare, and science.
But hey, at least you gave the fascists a fair shot despite their open plans for evil, right?

I can think of two billionaires that I'm tentatively okay with. One sold a software service for a dollar a year to a couple billion people, and the other is a musician with an extremely valuable musical portfolio and popular live shows.
The key part being that they almost entirely made their money by actually producing something themselves, not just leveraging money to make money or leeching off the work of others, and what they made actually provides value. $1 a year for communication services is a fair value, and the musician has easily provided more than a billion hours of enjoyment.

I can't think of anyone else that it seems reasonable to have that much money that actually has that much money.

and tasted normally

I agree we should eat the rich, but I'll also admit that it's a rare treat, so worth going all out on the seasoning and dining experience. At the least some fresh herbs and butter basted. :P

I'd cap it high enough so that you can obviously retire with a life of luxury, leave your children unquestionably provided for, and start a few odd businesses without realistically risking the previous points.
"Solving" you and your families material needs is sort of the endgame for wealth. The extra for random business ventures is because society actually benefits from people with safety nets taking risks to see if something makes money. It works better if we had a society wide safety net so failure doesn't kill you, but even a limited form still has a benefit.

Anything leftover shouldn't go to charity, it should go back to the society that helped them get the money in the first place. Charity is good, but it's ultimately a bandaid on social problems, and too often isn't distributed evenly or without condition to those who need it. Taxes and entitlement programs won't require a religious sermon to get food,

I want what's best for the country, specifically the people in it, and the world as a whole.
I hope that trump fails because his stated objectives are abhorrent to common decency, fiscal prudence, and functional governance.

What he calls waste I don't believe for a second is actually waste. He has done nothing to earn my trust in that or any other regard, and so I don't. Certainly not enough to trust them with something as broad as "waste", if the fools who think that any scientific research they don't see the point of is "waste" like so many of the examples have been.

Listening and judging a politician based on their words and actions isn't being "partisan". The electorate can't even be "partisan hacks", they're the one's whose interests and opinions are supposed to be being represented.

It's not up to the American people to live up to the expectations of politicians. It's literally a politicians entire job to live up to ours, and do things that benefit us. If the politicians goal is contrary to that end, I hope they fail.
I'm not gonna wish someone who wants to harm me, my family and my friends luck just so that they might not want to in the future. They need to earn my trust, not the other way around.

If they do nothing for four years and things remain exactly the same as today, I'll count that as a win. If they yell "psych!" and actually do something good I'll eat a hat.

There's a difference between screaming into the echo chamber and support.

And in any case, I would disagree that we should just not talk about politics. If nothing else, there doesn't have to be a greater benefit to calling the president a shitheel for it to be worth doing if you think that.

I am definitely pissed that he turned out to be that sort of person.

Sometimes people hold their own behavior to a different standard than they hold others, or don't internalize how profoundly weighted the power dynamic actually is.
If you don't see yourself as having as much power as you actually do in a dynamic, then you might behave in a way that's abusive without seeing it as such, even if you'd readily take issue with the same situation in circumstances where you did see the disparity.

Or just cynically playing a part for reputation. Neither excuses anything, but it can be helpful to know how some people find themselves doing bad things without thinking to themselves "today I'm gonna be a shit bag".

I'm not honestly sure that we should. Sometimes supporting and wanting what's best for the country means earnestly hoping the president utterly fails.

I sincerely hope this trump administration accomplishes less than they did last time, ideally nothing.

Just for pedentasim, most wealth held by the extremely rich is in the form of assets that aren't covered by the estate taxes. This is often by design.

They do need to be made. By medical professionals. The people who can actually determine who's viable to save and who can best utilize resources, and who actually know if there even is a shortage. Which there usually isn't.

The last people you want doing it are the people with a financial incentive to always deny care.

In the ideal world, an insurance company handles the paperwork of collecting money for risk pooling and paying the bills as they come in, as well as assessing individual risks to set premiums.
Sort of like most other insurance industries. Maybe arguing about if you paid for coverage, but not actually arguing that you don't need the fix.

Your car insurance might argue you aren't covered for damage that happened while the car was parked in the garage, but they won't try to argue that your car might not actually require a new windshield since you haven't tried plastic wrap yet.

In this ideal world, the people making the decision to ration care would be... The doctors, who are perfectly positioned to do this, and actually do when there's a real need to do so.

It's because fastfood places need to compete on either value or quality. They can also try to do both by primarily aiming to convey quality and having a special menu or set of offerings that promise the same quality but at a better price.

Wendy's mostly brands themselves as quality focused as compared to other fast food places. So their "good deal" offering has to promise to offer the same quality at a lower price, which means smaller. So they call it big to camouflage that it's actually smaller.

Well, goes to show how fucked my memory is recently. 🤦

I mean, no, it isn't. It is a marketing decision after all.
That doesn't mean that type of thing isn't the product of AI research.