TrackerFF

How long and far did Trump go to get Hunter Biden in the Burisma case, without getting anywhere?

Their grand victory was a handgun case, and tax avoidance. Absolute victory.

Joe Biden knew that if he didn't pardon Hunter, Trump would make the DOJ look through every aspect if his life with a fine comb, and throw the book at everything they could find, for no other reason than to keep him occupied (and drained) in court.

You can't take any moral high ground when dealing with people that are as morally and ethically corrupt as Trump.

In the end, Trump would 100% have given out mass pardons whether Biden did it or not. It is ridiculous to even entertain the idea that Trump would / will act otherwise. The amount of brazen and naked corruption going on is staggering.

Russia knows that if they want to keep annex countries, they'll have to take them piece by piece, with little resistance.

Basically making everything more shitty, and having people walk on eggshells - so that they'll vote for isolationist parties that are either neutral, or will outright appease Russia.

The idea is that no-one in Europe actually wants to go to war with Russia, and small remainders like these is enough to increase that fear.

One with RTX5090, 64GB DDR5, Ryzen 9, 4TB goes for equivalent to $13500, with most of that being the GPU and RAM.

A year ago, the same PC would have cost a third or so.

In any case, with the combination of expensive GPU, RAM, who the hell can actually afford this stuff.

Some speculation has been icing on the plane, since it looks like it entered a small storm cell. It originally flew around a larger storm going on, but just around the time it started losing altitude, it had gone through a small cell. Then when the plane goes back into colder area, rapid ice formation happens due to supercooling.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The problem is that people today do not have skin in the game for what happens generations down the line. No real consequences, little desire for actual change.

Meanwhile, we've had a AI-group that's almost 6 years now, where we've explored the models and uses since they became commercially available.

We're trying to get the word out that our colleagues should not get too invested or locked to a single model or supplier. Try to become a vendor-agnostic AI user, while we're working on rolling out org wide local models and tools.

We really do have to remind users, all the time, that the price they pay right now for a monthly subscription, might blow up anytime - as these subscriptions are obviously heavily subsidized.