Why even declare such an outlandish number?
What’s the difference between saying 2.2T or a gajillion bazillion?
What’s the difference between saying 2.2T or a gajillion bazillion?
Yes, the strategy here is effectively just to throw out a huge number to argue that the damage done would be impossible to truly correct. But as a general principle you can't go to court and just ask for whatever number you feel like, you need to justify to the court exactly why you are owed that much. So they ran the numbers and $2.15T is what they thought they could justify.
Everything else looks solid, then after seeing that number, it changes how I see the whole thing.
The other side can and will challenge the damages via experts. Obviously they will not see $2 Trillion, but you ask for at least to be made whole.
We estimate it has caused 2,2T in damage and are seeking 100B.
They are obviously very smart people and haven’t done it like this for a reason.
(A dollar bill is .0043in thick, so unless imperial unit-challenged me messed up doing the conversions, it should be almost 2/3 of the way from Earth to The Moon.)
This would be awfully inconvenient, though - if you use $100 bills instead, you'd have a still very inconvenient, but more manageable stack of 1,500 miles.
More manageable still would be to just put the ones in a warehouse - they'd require 88M cubic feet of space, or a cube with sides of 445ft. It should fit nicely inside the Saturn V Vehicle Assembly Building.
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the total "economic burden" of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment, and criminal justice involvement.
That totals $1.57T over 20 years and is purely economic, and doesn't include any value of human life.
https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/opioids/opioid-overdos...