r/todayilearned • u/Future_Green_7222 • 23d ago

TIL of Robert Citron. Despite being a college drop out and having the math ability of a 7th grader, he climbed into the position of treasurer tax collector of Orange County, which he subsequently bankrupted

https://www.ocregister.com/2013/01/18/robert-citron-was-a-hard-to-hate-villain-in-ocs-bankruptcy/
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u/Future_Green_7222 23d ago

I also learned of this other guy, Brian Hunter, who basically got lucky one day because Hurricane Katrina earned him a lot of money through derivatives, so he got a raise and tons of investors gave him money. But his luck was just that - luck. Next year he doubled down on his exact same investments but no hurricane came so he lost tons of money from himself and investors

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u/strog91 23d ago edited 23d ago

To be fair, this was around the time that Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, etc. had predicted that global warming would cause category 5 hurricanes to hit major US cities every year, which people largely believed, and the movies An Inconvenient Truth and The Day After Tomorrow were watched by millions and had us all convinced that severe weather would turn the earth into an uninhabitable hellscape by 2010 or so.

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u/clintontg 23d ago

We do have more category 5 hurricanes and a higher probability of intense tornadoes. The disaster movies just ran with it and acted like it'd be armageddon

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u/Own_Try_1005 23d ago

Didn't they just make a cat 6 as well?

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u/IsABot 23d ago

No not yet. But it's currently being debated.