Even more financial fraud charges against her, and also her husband and niece.

A decade ago I was contracting for MSFT as a database admin / data analyst.

A far older and more experienced contractor told me that he had been part of a team in Saudi Arabia, in 1990, that intercepted computer and electronic equipment bound for Iraq’s air defense command and control systems, flashing the firmware with exploits and backdoors as fast as they could before they were sent to Iraq.

Supply chain interception has been a thing for a while.

EDIT: This is a total off topic aside, but hearing about and seeing shit like that at the various tech jobs I’ve worked is why I laugh when people say ‘oh but alexa only activates on keywords’ or ‘no its totally impossible for phones to listen to your convos and then give that data to advertisement systems’.

Call me paranoid, I don’t care: If you don’t have a hardware disconnect for your microphone and personally have the source code to every bit of software, at every level, then we just have to take the giant tech corpos at their word.

Kero kero.

Every day my disabled ass gets closer and closer to relearning Spanish and just moving/‘retiring’ to Costa Rica.

• Made in a facility staffed by boned babies.

• • We mean babies with bones.

If this was a real lemmy shitpost it would be blinding bright beans splattering all over the windshield.

I spent quite a while paying for therapy to overcome depression.

Problem was that my depression was basically just caused by poverty: Too poor to afford healthy food, a car, a living situation that didn’t include unstable abusive narcissists causing me stress, lack of sleep, constantly guilt tripping me for things I had no control over, shaming me for enjoying anything they didn’t approve of, telling me I have mental issues.

So … what I need is money, a fresh start, a new living sitch… and I am paying a bunch of money for my therapist to also become depressed at my situation and just give me the same CBT exercises I already know.

Why did I pay for all those sessions?

Oh right, my roommates were gaslighting me.

I am currently extremely not depressed now that I am finally faaaaar away from them.

SubTote.

(A submersible capable tote bag)

Yep, they’ve been called ‘gold diggers’, for quite a while now.

There is still a huge portion of American women across the political spectrum, across wealth classes, across religious or irreligious beliefs, who ultimately have a huge part of what they want in a partner be ‘how much stuff can he buy me’, who will bully or shame or guilt trip or emasculate or outright violently abuse their male partner, regardless of how hypocritical this is with their other espoused beliefs, to get them to pay for things for them or cover their debts.

Just get on tiktok or instagram, you basically can’t miss it.

Its more than just the opposite number of conservative tradwives. There are plenty of self described liberal or leftist, feminists or social activists of one kind or another that ultimately still want their male partners to provide far more for them than they provide for their partner.

on a see saw

I mean, the IMF doing debt traps for 80 years is kind of the main defining feature of neo-colonialism.

China’s BnR initiative is just a competing form of it.

Both of these things can simultaneously be bad.

If VR or AR goggles ever do become widespread, they will almost certainly be like the corporate hell UI from Ready Player One with 90% of your vision taken up by seizure inducing brainrot tier ads, or the scene from Altered Carbon where the only point of the contact lense is to add insane holographic signs and displays to every 5 feet of a street.

I still cannot believe that the Earth of Wall-E is currently looking like our most likely trajectory, and what, nearly half of Americans now are obese?

Vegan Heart:

Housing (homes and apartments) is either in yet another bubble, or I guess just going to permanently remain absurdly high, slowly filtering more and more people into homelessness and death.

EDIT: (derp i fucked it up, EDIT 2)

Average rent vs median wage, cpi adjusted, and indexed to 1982 = 100.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1raP7

(Basic take away: the average real rent is about 4.2x or 420% what it was in 1982 whereas the median real wage has only risen by about 1.2x or 20%)

Edit 3: I would do median rent vs median wage, but FRED does not appear to track median rent.

Personal debt levels are astoundingly bad EDIT: If you do not own a house. The average US renter credit score is 638, and most places won’t even consider you if it is below 620.

https://www.investopedia.com/do-you-need-credit-to-rent-apartment-8600564

… a study from Rent Cafe found that the average credit score of renters in the U.S. was 638 in 2020 (the most recent data available),…

The medical system remains ruinously expensive and corrupt.

The proportion of those who are not counted as unemployed, but who are not working, climbs higher and higher. is lowering, but still has not recovered to Pre-Covid levels, much less abated its general downward trend since the 90s.

(Labor Force Participation Rate).

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1raRG

College costs climb further and further, offering less and less likelihood of an actual decent paying job.

Wealth inequality is the worst in the known economic history of the world.

I mean, these borders might make for an interesting alt-history scenario?

It is in the state he resides in.

‘A wild ride that I was not expecting’ could be the subtitle of my autobigraphy rofl.

When I played Smash Melee as a kid, a few of the neighbor kids would flail about so violently that they would rip their controller out of the console, elbow or armbar me in the face to the point I was bleeding and bruised, throw their controllers about the room breaking the controller and whatever it hit, and just outright kick or punch me with a free hand right as I was about to clinch a game.

Years later, I would learn that that one time I came home from school early and saw a man in a neat black suit talking with my dad, who quickly made an exit, this person was not in fact my dad’s friend from work.

He was a fucking FBI agent surveilling the house of the extremely violence normalized kids.

Turns out their dad was some kind of convicted felon in another state, moved here, and was suspected of illegally purchasing or possessing a firearm.

So yeah about half a year later violent-family dad was arrested.

PS: For added irony, my dad later fell down the Q Anon rabbit hole and showed me his whole set up and process for assembling/manufacturing ghost guns with no serial numbers.

The way the Prisoner’s Dilemma works is the idea that multiple players in a game choosing what is individually rational for them does not actually result in the best outcome for them as a group.

The whole point is that from the perspective of a single prisoner, ratting out the other guy is the best option, independent of what that other guy does.

So, with two prisoners unable to coordinate their strategies (isolated), they go with what is individually the most rational strategy, even though the is suboptimal, whereas if they were not isolated and could coordinate their moves, they would choose an absolutely optimal outcome for themselves as a group.

If one prisoner rats the other out, and the other does not, the rat gets a superficially better outcome, whereas the trusting one that was betrayed gets absolutely screwed.

…

If you did a game theory version of a Revolution, this problem is worse by orders of magnitude.

Sure, yes, if millions of people actually overthrow a broken system and establish a more equitable one, almost every one (non billionaires) are better off.

But if only one person revolts, they are jailed or die.

Add to that that the planning and coordination of trying to organize a million ‘prisoners’ to all revolt is itself a crime, and it is no wonder that such things rarely happen.

The idea is basically that for an individual, expecting, assuming, hoping for cooperation from the other players is individually risky, likely to be costly, thus, it is less likely to occur.

If your plan only works if millions go along with you, and if millions don’t, you end up dead or in jail, and you have no real way of knowing that millions will go along with you… then for most people the shitty status quo is preferable to death or jail.

…

There are situations in real life and in game theory where styles of cooperation, or of testing loyalty in a repeated series of games that can lead to cooperation, do exist, but the studies on this are basically fancy math showing how difficult trust and cooperation are to achieve, and how easily trust is lost and never regained once betrayed.

Welp, guess I’ll just die then.