Like some people said on HN, the premise of this is based on a misunderstanding of how the poverty line is calculated.

Look, just because some people on HN turned their brain off, it doesn’t mean you have to listen to them. It’s clear if they said this, they read a tenth of the article at most and then jumped to conclusions. The misunderstanding is theirs, and now yours unless you read and grok the whole article.

They don’t take each year’s grocery expenses and multiply by 3.

Indeed they do not.

Instead they take the same 1963 figure and adjust it each year for inflation generally.

Okay. But what underpins the 1963 figure? That’s his whole point. The figure effectively looked at one variable and assumes that several related others remain static for 60 years.

This means if [it] was an accurate estimate then and the inflation calculation is correct, then it should remain roughly accurate

If it were instead adjusted for inflation since 1910, and the poverty line was based on horse maintenance expenses x3, because it made sense at the time, and it was an accurate estimate then, would this have remained roughly accurate to today? Neigh way José.

The benchmark is not keeping up with modern expenses, nor does it factor in changes to known 1963 variables that the benchmark still presumes are static, effectively pegged at 1963 values.

Just read the whole article. Your future depends on it.

Stop bragging 😂

When things get dire, the fast and high bandwidth Internet we know will be gone, but a form of slow, intermittent Internet will probably be around; still technically an Internet.

The E stood for Elimination.

Even more fitting, really.

Part of me wonders if they sell your driving telemetry to your insurance company, and if those companies pay out more for data on worse offenders. If so, they’re just letting you tie your own increased insurance rate noose by providing that option, for their own financial gain.

On brand for an Amazon property.

And the back button will break the entire app.

Oh, so that’s why Google is killing sideloading.

Then again, I could have accomplished the same thing by knocking off work for the day and going to the driving range.

Hey, look at the bright side, as long as you were chained to your desk instead, that’s all that matters.

Ha!

By bolding “every category”, are you implying that sliding into fascism was one of the categories they tracked?

Oh my god, I’ve thinking about why git doesn’t operate this way for ages, but it already has for a decade. This is going to change my life. Thank you for posting this.

Wait, what? How?

I think there is a difference between doxxing someone for, say, having an opinion, v.s. investigating someone who demonstrably appears to be actively defrauding people (and possibly worse in this case), it leads to an actual convict, then informing people to beware.

I haven’t been following this, and I imagine others already have similar thoughts on this, but this article raised my hackles on this Louie dude.

When Rossmann searched for Luan Tahiraj, he was stunned.

News articles revealed that in 2013, Tahiraj had been jailed in Australia for offences against two girls, aged 13 and 14. In total, he served an eight-year sentence, with parole after four.

Court records show that Tahiraj sent the 13-year-old a file while chatting to her on MSN Messenger. He promised he would help her get more friends on MySpace, but it was, in fact, a remote administration tool (RAT).

Using the RAT, Tahiraj took over the girl’s computer and threatened to destroy it and hack her social media if she didn’t perform certain sexual acts for him.

He then recorded these acts via her webcam and shared the video online.

Jesus Christ. What a fucking monster. Only 8 years and served half that? Unbelievable.

McEwen says the AFP found evidence that Tahiraj had hacked 133 people using the RAT technology.

“They prosecuted on two matters, but there were many more out there that they did not prosecute, because it’s about the quality of cases that you bring to court,” he says.

There is no suggestion that these other people were underage.

“But it shows that the appetite didn’t stop at two,” McEwen says.

“It went far broader than that.”

A serial psychopath. Unbelievable they could only get him on 2 counts.

My spidey senses are tingling, I wonder if he couldn’t help himself and was doing the same thing again with his PS5 diagnostic software.

But she had repeatedly told him she was not trying to pirate his software, and also that she thought one of his security systems, called Digital Rights Management (DRM), was invasive and beyond the norm.

Other people were saying the same thing, pointing out that Louie’s DRM system could identify if you were running competitors’ software.

Some voiced concerns about the risk of malware or spyware if you did as Louie suggested on his website and turned off your anti-virus to run his software.

Alarm bells.

“There is no actual proof that I hack my customers, spy on my customers, breach any laws, or even go outside my own terms and conditions,” he wrote on the Better Way Electronics website.

“The fact that nobody has proven otherwise […]”

There it is. One of these brazen unremorseful psychos that didn’t learn shit from his imprisonment. They only got him on 2 of 135 crimes in which he did heinous shit to people after all, so now he thinks he can keep doing the same thing. He thinks he is such a genius, he is outright daring people in front of their faces. It’s a game to him.

Jones paid about $300 to buy a licence for the software, which at first worked perfectly. “It was maybe two weeks later, after we were like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be so great,’ that we started to have problems,” she says.

I bet it took about 2 weeks for him to get around to remoting into their PS5 diagnostics computer where the software was installed. The software does have to work of course, to be a tasty enough bait.

Access revoked

Better Way Electronics’s owner, Louie, fired off an email as a warning: Jones would be banned from the software she just bought if she kept running it “in a modified state”.

She had no idea what he meant, and told him she had only used it as advertised — to fix PlayStations. But Louie was unmoved, pointing to his terms and conditions, which stated he could revoke access at any time, even without providing a reason.

The pair went around in circles, Jones assuring him she wasn’t trying to pirate anything and suggesting the problem must be at his end, and Louie not having a bar of it, until things got heated on both sides.

Their interaction ended with Jones being banned from using the software.

But Jones soon saw she was not the only one having problems; other people were saying online they were getting banned without cause, and without a refund.

My speculative take is, these repair folks were running this software on clean-room machines used only for PS5 diagnostics, in a DMZ (or something similar), especially if the advice was to disable antivirus in order to use the software. I speculate when he eventually remoted in and snooped around, this would either a) look like a reverse engineering environment, or b) piss him off because he couldn’t get into anything else, or it was boring compared to his expectations/whatever his intent was.

Presumably, when he couldn’t get what he was looking for, he’d just jump right to fucking with them plainly over email instead of some other m.o. we’re unaware of, perhaps because this blew up too soon. I mean, why not, he’s already got their money and the terms let him do it; he set it up that way. And “stopping piracy” is the perfect smokescreen.

It makes sense when the primary goal isn’t actually money. Any business that isn’t “interesting” is competition to another business that actually is interesting, therefore the competition for them should be culled, so that the “interesting” business pool is stronger. Perfect psycho logic.

This is some weird power trip on many levels. Just like his previous 135 victims were subjected to his power. Disgusting.

This is all speculation on my part, of course.

“I feel you don’t understand me and my business goals.”

I fucking bet.

Are you aware of any exceptional economists (besides yourself, of course)? Can you divulge their name(s)?

novibe nailed it elsewhere in this thread, but nobody’s explained the mechanism.

https://youtu.be/0quhLtBXijM?t=4m30s

Within 90 seconds the mechanism is explained, within 5 minutes you understand the money flow, within 15 minutes this meme is covered, and within 20 minutes there’s a suggested solution.

Or people with brainrot succumb to ChatGPT easily. Or maybe one then the other…

Guess that could be an indicator of which caused which.