In some states, it’s not exactly random. I forget where I saw the analysis, but somewhere there was research showing that people with surnames higher in the alphabet were getting called in at a statistically higher rate.

Two of the greatest voices in history. Their simultaneous laugh would’ve set off seismometers miles away.

I don’t know if I’m a Tolkien expert, but as far as I know, the fell beasts were basically pterodactyls; I think unintentionally by Tolkien at first, but he later leaned into it. They were awful and terrible, but they were also very much natural creatures.

The great eagles, on the other hand, were potentially Maiar–the same kind of pseudo-divine, pseudo-angelic being that the Wizards are (and Sauron and the Balrog, notably). If I recall correctly, Tolkien went back and forth on whether or not they actually were Maiar, but even if they weren’t, they were at least elevated by the Valar.

If the eagles were Maiar, they would be nearly unkillable by normal people in Third-Age Middle-Earth. As far as I can remember, we only see the deaths of four Maiar during the Third Age, and all in the last few years of it: the balrog known as Durin’s Bane (killed by Gandalf), Gandalf himself (killed by the balrog), Saruman (killed by Grima, but only after having his powers stripped by Gandalf), and Sauron (killed by his own hubris by putting all of his power into the One Ring). It seems like it takes a Maia to kill a Maia, at least in the Third Age.

The fell beasts, on the other hand, are very killable. Legolas casually takes down one of them with an arrow (one!) after Lothlorien, and Eowyn beheads one almost incidentally on her way to the Witch-King. The rest are killed in the eruption of Mt. Doom after the destruction of the Ring, which the eagles survived; both of which are kind of immaterial to the point, the fell beasts being right over the top of a magical volcano while the eagles were half a Mordor away when it happened.

But it does bring us back to the Eagles; because while the Lord of Eagles does mention “risking ourselves” against the “great bows of yew” wielded by the men around Mirkwood during the time of The Hobbit, it seems like he was being a bit over-cautious. Even if the Eagles weren’t Maiar and were technically killable, we see the Great Eagles participate in (by my count) three battles: the rescue of the Dwarves from the Goblins and Wargs outside Goblin-Town, the Battle of Five Armies outside Erebor, and the Battle of the Black Gate at the end of Return of the King, but we don’t see a single Eagle killed or even wounded in any of those affairs.

But the eagles were also a lot bigger.

Tolkien was vague about the fell beasts’ size, but we can make some assumptions; it had to have been small enough for Eowyn to cut completely through its neck in a single stroke, and leaving aside the question of her strength, the neck certainly couldn’t have been thicker than the sword was long. Assuming that the Rohirrim used swords like the early medieval Anglo-Saxons they’re based on, that means a blade length (and thus a neck thickness) of about 75cm/2.5 feet at most.

But there’s no chance Eowyn could use the entire length of the blade. That’s not a statement on her gender, nobody could do that. In the real world, the maximum would be something like 15cm/6in, but this is a heightened fantasy world. Let’s say Eowyn–empowered by her love for her uncle and the power of the very Valar themselves–could use more than half of that (very sharp!) blade to chop through a credulity-straining 40cm fell beast neck. To do some really sloppy math, a cobra chicken Canada Goose has a neck thickness in the ballpark of 5cm, which means that we can easily multiply its dimensions by about 8 to see what a reasonable size for a fell beast might be: the goose’s wingspan of 125cm then becomes a 1000cm/33ft fell beast wingspan. Certainly formidable for the real world; that would make it about three times the size of the largest living flying bird, the Andean Condor, and about 1.5 times the size of the largest flying bird ever, Pelagornis miocaenus.

But the eagles were significantly bigger. Thorondor, the mightiest Great Eagle of the First Age, was said to have a wingspan of 30 fathoms, which is an insane 55m/180ft. Let’s assume the Great Eagles got significantly smaller by the end of the Third Age; they’d still need to be big enough to carry two emaciated hobbits, or one full-grown wizard, or one very fat dwarf. (I’m assuming here that the ringwraiths, being wraiths, had no meaningful mass and thus we don’t have to apply the same calculation to the fell beasts.) If we do a lot of handwaving with the average size of a normal eagle and its maximum load, and try to scale that up to being able to carry Bombur, and just sort of vaguely nod at the square-cube law, we end up with Gwaihir needing a wingspan of about 1500cm/50ft, significantly bigger than the fell beast!

Couple that with their undefeated battle record, including one where they fought against the fell beasts, and the Great Eagles are clearly more formidable.

(sources: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, and probably more I don’t remember. Side note, look at this hilarious early drawing of a pterosaur. It looks like a winged possum.)

From a tactical perspective, his anti-air capabilities are somewhat immaterial. The ringbearer would have to land in order to throw the ring into the volcano, and if said ringbearer was flying there, it would be child’s play for Sauron to see that and just send every orc, troll, and ringwraith over there to wait for him.

You’re very kind, thank you.

“You say you have nothing, but you have a hat right there in your hands. CURIOUS!”

Yeah, all ownership and money is made up, and the value of everything is more-or-less arbitrary. But for the sake of this question, the value of one is more real than the other.

For one thing, the transactions representing “market value” are not all going to happen today. The combined value of every company’s shares on US exchanges is something like $75T, and on a really really good day maybe like $1T is going to actually change hands. If all of it ever did, the market value would probably fluctuate, but it would stay about the same because all of those shares are still out there and they all have a selling price.

But for your house, well, you may well actually sell it today. If you do, you will actually (yes, insert all the asterisks here) get all of that money out of your asset, and after that the asset is worth nothing to you because you don’t own it anymore. Its value is real and attainable.

That value fluctuates with speculation, sure; but if the economy were to collapse, having a house to live in is still of use. A piece of paper saying you own a hundred-millionth of a corporation which no longer exists isn’t, save as tinder. That gives real estate some floor of value that a stock could never have; it’s very unlikely that they would ever stop tracking the fact that you own a home just because the value went to zero, but they regularly delist companies from the NYSE and NASDAQ.

And the other thing is, I’ve done a pretty poor job of pointing out that we’re talking about two different types of valuations here: one is the valuation of an entire market, while the other is the valuation of a specific asset owned by an individual. When talking about the $75T valuation of the stock market (and its $1.8T loss), we’re talking about the former; its analogy in real estate isn’t a single house, it’s the housing market as a whole. But when talking about a single mortgage, the analogy is to a single stock share.

When the market lost $1.8T in value, the only individuals who lost any money were the ones who had the misfortune to sell when the price was lower than they paid for it; but their losses didn’t contribute to that valuation loss (other than indirectly), they were an effect of it. It’s entirely possible for an individual to lose money in a bull market or make money in a bear market.

On the other hand, if your individual home loses value, it has…well, um, lost value. If you sell it when its value is lower than what you paid for it, regardless of how great the market as a whole is, there’s no way for you to make money in that transaction (yes, asterisk, I’m sure there are ways in which that might still be a financially beneficial choice, yada yada). Its value directly means something to you in a way that the market value doesn’t.

Anyway, I’ve used a lot of words but not been super clear, so I guess I should stop for now.

More than that, it’s different in every state. iirc some states have stopped sending paper registrations entirely, while others practically still require women to have a note from their fathers. Somehow those fifty different systems have to talk to one another, too.

So not only do they have to get the House and the Senate to agree on something, and get the President to not veto it, they also have to get every single state to actually prioritize and fund the change across each jurisdiction (and there are a total of 3,244 counties in the US, so that’s another layer of complication).

It’s like turning the Titanic, but the Titanic is towing 50 boats behind it, each of which are towing dozens to hundreds of boats behind them. And the captain of the Titanic is senile, and half of the tiny boats in the back are actively sinking, and the iceberg is currently cutting into the hull, and…

This is the correct answer. Last time I was pulled over the officer only asked for my license, actually.

“May I see your license, please?”

“Yes sir.”

“Thanks. Are you aware that your passenger brake light is out?”

“No sir.”

“Get that fixed as soon as you can. Here’s your license. Drive safe.”

In fairness, I’m a middle aged white man, so I’m aware that I run basically every police interaction in easy mode.

Very simply, we jump ship from any server that starts down that dark path. Keep it impossible for any single company to exercise any meaningful control over the fediverse.

Functionally, to the people who shorted stocks or sold while it was still high. But more accurately, it goes nowhere; the “market value” isn’t an actual number, it’s just a shorthand for “how much all the people currently playing the stock market are willing to spend on stocks.” They count up all the shares of every stock currently issued, multiply it by the amount people are willing to pay for those shares, and that’s the market value. When it goes down, that money doesn’t “go anywhere,” because it never actually existed to begin with; it was just describing how much confidence people had in the market.

The people who short stock or who sell high are the ones who have played the game so as to benefit when that confidence drops, so they get some actual money out of the deal; but they didn’t “make” $1.8T yesterday. That’s just how much less confident investors in the American stock market are.

The mortgage example is a little bit different. True, that money “didn’t exist” before you signed the loan (loans do increase the money supply), but it’s still “real money” inasmuch as it’s secured by the asset that is your home, and backed by the other assets that the bank holds (i.e. other people’s secured mortgages), and pays out real, actual, spendable cash, since the builders still need money to buy two-by-fours, for instance. The person who pays the mortgage probably never actually touches any of that money, but it still has at least some basis in reality. Fractional reserve banking feels kind of stupid, but it’s been around for long enough to be a plot point in It’s A Wonderful Life, more or less with no major issues (aside from the obvious one).

With the stock market (and pretty much all speculative markets), it’s different. That money exists even less than it exists for a mortgage transaction; speculative markets don’t increase the money supply the same way that bank loans do, because the money isn’t based on anything in the real world at all.

To illustrate: a stock can lose value without anything changing hands at all. If you buy a stock for a hundred real dollars on Monday and that company does something stupid on Tuesday, your share could lose half of its value even though nothing changed hands that day. If you sold that stock on Wednesday, you might get only $50 of real money back. “Where did the money go?” Nowhere. I mean, functionally, the person (or bank or whatever) from whom you bought the stock on Monday still has the other $50, but they didn’t steal it; it’s just that now, there’s nobody who wants to spend $100 to buy it from you anymore. That money isn’t secured by anything or backed by any objective source of value. It’s entirely subject to whims and vibes, which economists call “market forces” to feel better about themselves.

When people talk about “market value,” it’s those whims and vibes they’re talking about: how much people are willing to pay for shares. There are X-million shares out there which people are willing to buy for $Y each; multiply those two numbers and you get the total market value. So when a market “loses value,” it doesn’t mean that any actual money has gone anywhere, it means that nobody wants to spend that much to buy into the market anymore; Y has just gotten smaller. If every bank account in the world was suddenly frozen and no money could move anywhere, the market could (and almost certainly would) still lose value.

Now, in all likelihood a good chunk of money has actually gone somewhere in addition; the people who shorted the stock and who sold early while it was still worth a lot are the ones who have it now. But that’s not where it was lost, because that’s not what “market value” actually measures.