TrackerFF

How can they be brought to justice? They can't. That's the long and the short of it.

Turns out selling one dollar bills for a dime does lead to growth, but not much else.

Dementia is a brutal disease. My grandmother passed away two years ago from vascular dementia, took around 10 years from first symptoms to she passed. The worst part, IMO, is that the disease robs the person of their personality. My grandparents were...passionate but volatile people. They'd have intense discussions, which would evolve into shouting matches, and then 5 minutes later back to normal, as if it never happened. They were both very social.

Around midway into the disease, she just became very quiet. Apathic. Didn't want to hold a conversation - couldn't hold a conversation. At the this time my grandpa had a nasty fall accident, which resulted in a brain hemorrhage - the long term effect was that he lost his short term memory, and basically had dementia symptoms. I guess that was a blessing, because especially he was feeling the effects of living with a dementia patient. At least now they were somewhat blissfully unaware of their problems (after the accident he started rationalizing my grandmothers dementia with her simply "losing her hearing")

In any case, the loss of personality sucks big time. Three years before her death, things ramped up. Misplaced items everywhere, cleaning up after their accidents, basically "dementia-proofing" every single thing in the house. Tracking down hearing aids which they had a habit of just hiding. By aunt basically worked full time as a caretaker, for a whole year straight. She had to go into early retirement by two years, just to be able to do that. And that was with healthcare professionals checking by 3-4 times a day.

The relief was immense when they finally got placed into a memory care facility, but sadly that's also when things started to speed up.

My grandparents were basically my extra parents growing up, and meant the world to me. When I was a bit younger they both experienced serious health problems, and my anxiety shot through the roof - sure, they were in their 70s, but losing them was unthinkable to me.

So when they finally passed, one year from each others, I was surprised to not feel that much sadness anymore. More relived that they didn't have to suffer anymore. In a way, they were already "gone" years prior to their bodies passing away.

The most interesting part of it is how much PR / media storm they (the wealthy) manage to create around this topic. Last election it more or less dominated the media, which I also think backfired on them.

The vast, vast majority of wealth (to the wealthy) are in form of company ownership, stocks.

So let's say you start taxing the ultra-wealthy based on their assets. They then have the option of:

1) Make the company pay out dividends, so that owners can afford to pay their wealth tax. Not ideal, because what happens during bad years where there's no dividends to be paid out? Or if companies want to re-invest in the company?

2) Sell stocks. Again, not ideal. This would mean that you lose some ownership year by year.

3) Take up personal loans to cover taxes.

etc.

Note, I'm NOT saying that we shouldn't do anything. But this is just the consequence of such assets (stocks) being the dominant asset among the wealthy.

Ownership and location (local vs cloud) of software aside, when was the last time anyone here had to - on a Windows computer - spend hours and follow 30+ step tutorials with manual patching and fixing, found deep in some user forum, to get current day software working?

I don't think I've had to do that in 15-20 years or so. At some point, shit just started working. Simple as. DLL hell is a thing of the past.

For years, decades even, employers were straight up offended by the idea of paying someone work 4 days instead of 5 days, while paying them the same. It made zero economical sense to them.

Then companies started testing it out, and have noticed that things like sick leaves plummeted, and that the employees produced the same amount, sometimes even more.

I didn't really get into coding before HS. By chance we had this elective class called "Java Programming", where the teacher showed us a bunch of applets which piqued my interest.

Our very first "real" program was some local network chat system, which I found extremely fascinating - because I had suddenly gone from writing a bunch of terminal/CLI programs which felt a bit...boring, to writing something which felt like "proper" software.

Back when I was a student, 25+ years ago, many professors were a bit lazy. They just re-used problem sets which they had made earlier. No single year would be alike, but the problem sets would still be from a larger collection.

The students would then hand down the big book of problem and solution sets down to the freshman class.

The professors, still being a bit lazy, knew this. But instead of scarping the old problems, they'd just say that cheating only hurts the students doing it - as the homework grades would not influence the final grade. And sure enough, the students that never did their own work, rarely did well (if at all passed) on the finals exam.

When I studied, in Norway, we never got any marks or points for our homework. Our final grade was based 100% on our final exam (or mix of final exam + projects for the classes which had those), which was always a pen and paper type of exam. We did have mandatory homework we had to complete, in order take the final exam, but we never got any grades on those.

Later on, when I became a TA, there were obvious signs of cheating in the homework, i.e. people handing in the same homework with the same step-by-step solution, with the exact same errors.

In any case, cheating on homework wouldn't help their grade.

While there's a lot of mysticism around the field, it is not a small one. In US alone tens and tens of thousands are employed at the various agencies. Only a tiny part are HUMINT working with assets, most have the most A4 office jobs imaginable.

But my point is: The one experience EVERYONE share (those that work there, or have worked), from the sanitary workers to the directors, is that they've gone through the security clearance process. A hefty enough credit card debt could jeopardize the clearance to any one of those.

So if I followed the story, it as GRU (Russian intel) that hacked his phone. Dutch intel then recruited a spy from GRU that handed over the data.

In any case, Kushner - and rightfully so - could not obtain a security clearance the first time around, due to massive debt. But it was overruled / waived by higher ups.

I've worked in intel, and Kushner seems like the textbook example - a cautionary tale - on the type of person you do not want to grant anything of importance.

Honestly it sort of blows my mind that the US has a system decisions by security professionals can simply be overruled.

There's also those user that simply don't like anything "political" in their tech discussions. Simple as that.

I'm not one of those, for the fact is that tech and politics has become more intertwined. It is becoming increasingly difficult to talk about the companies, founders, products of top tech companies without acknowledging that the very same things are entangled in the political landscape.

But, it is an explanation as to why people just flag these sort of posts. It's "too political" for their taste.

Not that they shouldn't, but you can be 100% sure Trump will hand out pardons left and right when his time comes up. He'll do a self pardon, too. Maybe he'll step down last minute, and have Vance hand out pardons, just in case.

The only things his cronies can be prosecuted for after that, would be state crimes.