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Re:Alex Jones to pay $965M to Sandy Hook victims by tptacek on Wednesday October 12, 2022 @06:53PM (#33184814)
By making millions of dollars by deliberately amplifying the pain of a murdered parent, so that they're harassed and threatened, face to face, even when they visit states across the country from where they live. It's not complicated. Jones really did fuck these people's lives up, and he did so knowing that their lives had already been devastated. It's hard to even think of a way to profit from the mass murder of first graders, but Alex Jones literally found a way to do it; he might be the only person to have done so successfully.
Re:Alex Jones to pay $965M to Sandy Hook victims by donatj on Wednesday October 12, 2022 @07:43PM (#33185290)
His profit isn't "actual damages" though. They haven't even decided punitive damages yet.

I can't figure the math on how any of them could have been damaged $64 million. The US government values a human life at $10 million, is this 6x worse than what the killer did?

Re:Alex Jones to pay $965M to Sandy Hook victims by tptacek on Wednesday October 12, 2022 @07:46PM (#33185305)
Contrary to popular opinion, there is not in fact a $10,000,000 cap on wrongful death damages. Plaintiffs semi-routinely get multiples of that.
Re:Alex Jones to pay $965M to Sandy Hook victims by thwayunion on Wednesday October 12, 2022 @09:41PM (#33186166)
> I can't figure the math on how any of them could have been damaged $64 million.

You're massively underestimating both the impact of Jones's behavior and the value of a lifetime of earnings for many two earner families.

Assume both parents were the equivalent of senior SWEs at google and now cannot work. The assumption that they can no longer work is not an unreasonable assumption; their children were slaughtered and then they were threatened by angry mobs for years (and still are). I wouldn't be able to hold down a job.

$64M * 2% = $1,300,000 per year safe withdrawal. (The 4% rule is good if you are retired, but 2% is more realistic if you're eg in your early 30s.)

$1,300,000 / 2 = $640,000 income per earner.

Subtract $20,000 per person to compensate for typical healthcare and retirement benefits [1]. Actually that's a lower bound because of tax implications. We're now at $620,000 per earner.

I'm actually surprised that there aren't at least a few families for whom the number is higher; eg two surgeons, a surgeon and a lawfirm partner, a principal engineer and a VP, etc. would all have lost far more than $640K/yr/earner. These aren't typical pairings, but they're also not particularly rare, and the Sandy Hook community's family median income is nearly 2x the national average so it's the type of place you might expect to find these sorts of people over-represented.

So anyways, we are already within the Senior FAANG salary range and haven't even considered the various serious damages caused by Jones's behavior, beyond his victims' inability to hold down fairly normal upper middle class jobs. Many of them had to move multiple times, probably now have serious and life-long mental health issues from the harassment piles on top of trauma, etc. Once you include those damages, you probably end up with that $64M principal translating to something that is not far from the median family income for Sandy Hook.

[1] eg, https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/benefits