based on the data we have now, the expected value of “pandemics per Trump presidency” is 1. so the null hypothesis is that we should expect another pandemic sometime in the next 4 years.

4 years from now, the best-case scenario is that we can revise that estimate downwards to 0.5 pandemics per Trump presidency.

I’m…not terribly optimistic about that. both because of the gutting of infectious-disease public health under White House Brainworms Czar RFK Jr, but also the chilling effect that the article mentions on immigrants, especially migrant farmworkers, who are the most likely vector for a strain of H5N1 to develop human-to-human transmission capability.

golly, I sure do feel awful for those executives.

imagine having something happen in the world - something completely out of your control - and as a result, your cost-of-living skyrockets, in a way you have no control over, you just have to pay it. I’m sure that’s an experience that is unique to CEOs and that other people have never had to deal with.

(my attorney has advised me to state that I think murdering CEOs is *checks notes* wrong)

tangentially related:

11 children worked ‘dangerous’ night shift at Iowa pork plant, investigators say

A sanitation contractor has been fined nearly $172,000

Burger King, Popeyes fined more than $2 million for violating child labor laws

poor people go to jail when they get caught committing crimes. wealthy people pay a fine and move on with their lives. usually the fine is small enough that they can just treat it as a cost of doing business.

when people can commit crimes without feeling any real consequences, vigilante justice like this is an entirely predictable outcome.

(and of course, there’s a whole additional layer to this problem, where there’s a ton of corporate malfeasance and misbehavior that harms society but technically isn’t a crime because of some loophole or another…those child labor law violations are one of the few examples where employing children is unambiguously against the law as well as being relatively easy to prove)