Now do his stepchildren, and exactly how much of their net worth came from Bernie's "campaign contributions".
The way the game is often played is to hire other family members as "consultants" at extremely high salaries (Bernie didn't invent this, by any means -- take a look at how many congresscritters have relatives on the campaign payroll) . In theory, you can't spend campaign money on yourself, but paying it to "consultants" is allowed. And if those "consultants" happen to be relatives, and they happen to use some of their "salaries" to buy luxuries for Dear Old Dad, that's perfectly fine.
Another good one is to set your relative, or even yourself, up in some ancillary business (e.g. advertising or printing). The late Oral Roberts (a TV preacher) was the innovator there. He was always crying about how he sent free Bibles and other religious stuff all over the world, and how many millions it cost. This was absolutely true.
What he never mentioned is that his non-profit ministry hired his very-much-for-profit printing company to print all this stuff.
As far as the government goes, there are pretty strict rules against paying actual government money out to relatives (though it does happen). The rules against paying out campaign contributions are a lot more lenient.
In the future, when you're old and quite possibly disabled, you might rethink the whole "walkable cities" thing.
I mean, it's easy to say "just walk (or ride a bike)" when you're 22 years old and in prime health, but the population in most First World countries is rapidly aging.
"Walkable cities" doesn't mean that everyone is forced to walk everywhere. It means that there are destinations (grocery store, restaurant, pub, library, cinema, hospital etc) you can reach within walking distance without having to play frogger on a highway. They are absolutely a boon to someone old and disabled. They can use assistive devices, public transport, and even cars to get around.
I think you have the wrong impression about what "walkable cities" mean.
A walkable city doesn't preclude driving. In fact it often improves it. If almost everybody is walking or biking or using transit that means there are few other cars and driving becomes much nicer too.
Better driving can only get you from 1 curb to another. You still have to walk to your actual destination whether it’s to the other end of the mall, or to your home’s door. In no way is this any worse in a walkable city which will not only allow you to walk everywhere when you’re able, therefore delaying any loss in walking capabilities, but will also include better and more accessible public and private curb to curb transportation.
A walkable city will also make the curb to actual destination far more walkable.
A walkable city will also mean a lot more options are accessible to the disabled through their wheelchairs, etc.
The biggest reason people loose muscle mass as they age is due to lack of use, so a built environment that encourages walking is going to help keep people in shape to walk as they age.
NY is an AARP top-10 most livable city alongside other pedestrian-centric cities like Boston and San Francisco. Orlando and Tulsa conspicuously absent. Aging in car cities sucks.
Old and handicapped people have lived before cars, and in less car-centric cities forever. Walkable cities mainly mean that things are close to you so you _can_ walk to them.
Actual car-free areas, like the access-controlled dense old towns in Europe, are possible (if built-out where they don't exist), but not necessarily to be walkable.
> WAY more old people can still drive than can walk a mile round trip carrying bags of groceries
Groceries are not a mile away when you live in a walkable neighborhood. My grandparents could easily walk to the corner store to buy their daily groceries until they passed away. Chances are that walking a little every day for their whole lives helped them stay in better shape.
> I mean, if y'all like "walkable cities" so much, why not just move to one
The few walkable neighborhoods where I live are, unsurprisingly, highly desirable and thus unaffordable. In my forties I don't feel like immigrating yet again to another country.
> But no, everyone else has to conform to what you think is best
The immense majority of the large metropolitan area where I live only allows single family homes to be built. I would like walkable neighborhoods to be made legal again so that offer can meet the existing demand.
Don't you worry, car-dependent suburbs are not at any risk of disappearing in North America.
Many more disabled people are disabled in a way that prevents them from driving a car than in ways that prevent them from walking. There is also a huge class of people who are physically capable of driving but legally barred from it.
In fact when I scroll back through your recent comments I find it hard to find any that don't break the site guidelines with some sort of aggressive or nasty edge.
We have to ban accounts that post like this. This is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for. It has also, unfortunately, been a problem for years:
I'm not going to ban your account right now because you've been here a long time, but if you want to keep posting here then we need you to properly fix this going forward. That means being respectful and curious, and it also means not being irritable, mean, or any of the other things that lead people into the flamewar style. So if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Yeah I wonder what people do, and have done, around the world in walkable communities predating the car. Perhaps people in these communities are on average more mobile into old age because they frequently walked?
They were (mostly) taken care of by extended multi-generational households. They obviously died and/or suffered to the extent that medical and QoL technology was insufficient. The whole status quo of pensioners migrating to Florida-style retirement community necropolis with a F-150 and a rubber stamped driver license is a modern US-centric phenomenon.
You are naming disparate & absurd things as the reason that European like walkable communities are bad for old people, like the difficulties of 1930's cities (or perhaps pre-industrial, you aren't very clear), the difference in landmass between the US and Europe (?) and the fact that there is a small range of disabilities that allow someone to drive and shop to Costco but not to go to a cornershop.
The reality is that being old sucks ass, but being old and sedentary (when you can avoid it) sucks worse. I've taken care of multiple senior family members & friends, the ones that were active, i.e walking everywhere, not avoiding stairs completely, have lived longer and happier. Sure, even active people gradually lose the ability to do day-to-day stuff and cars or microcars[1] can help them and other people with mobility concerns, but that's not an argument against walkable places.
Making streets non-hostile to pedestrians, having necessities closer to residences and prioritizing public transport makes people stop preferring cars as medium of transport if they don't need it (youngsters). This actually helps with traffic and in turn helps the people that need cars like someone with a rolling walker and arthritis or a delivery van.
Implying that people advocating for walkability are heartless youngins that don't care about old people just because you are losing arguments left and right, is actually really unempathetic.
Putting an item up for sale to the highest bidder insulates a seller from future claims that the item was sold for a low-ball price in some kind of sweetheart/kickback deal.
But Jobs is who made the boxes something that non-nerds wanted to have in their homes. There were dozens of computer companies at the time, some (not many, but some) of which had Woz-level engineers (e.g. Jay Miner and team at Atari). But only Apple survived.
Someone once said there would never have been an Apple if there had been only one Steve, and I agree.
Was he a jerk sometimes? Yeah, definitely. But he's not the first genius who's been a jerk. At the extreme, Isaac Newton was a horrible person.
I estimate mine is about 50% USPS, 25% UPS, and 25% Amazon's own delivery service. The proportion that's Amazon-delivered has been increasing noticeably over the past year or two.
Yep, came here to say this. I don't use it often, but it's pretty handy from time to time (e.g. checking to see if an important package requiring a signature is coming that day, so I can be home or arrange for someone else to be there).
My point was once you start adapting to all the requirements you inevitably end up with a more complex system. Another thing that happens in a war is that the enemy will adapt to what you're doing.
The principles are fine (well, not sure camera is the right only sensor but aside). The actual engineering of a working system you can use in real life is complicated and that's what many are working on.
A Phalanx_CWIS is overkill. Also, I suspected that the system received continuous upgrades throughout the decades.
Likewise, the Abrams tanks are cold war era tanks, but they are continuously upgraded that a modern Abrams tank isn't really a 1980 tank. Modernization is likely to remove some weight and make Abrams more survivable against drones, in response to the Russo-Ukrainian war;
Thanks for giving the OP some firsthand advice that answers his question and might actually work, rather than chiding him with some variant of "You shouldn't have trusted YouTube in first place ('you big dummy', implied)". That type of "advice" accomplishes nothing, other than maybe boosting the ego of the person making it.
They tend to get moderated away most of the time, which you can help by flagging them or emailing them to hn@ycombinator.com. Supercilious PSAs don't do any of that.
It's very common on HN. I do it too. Mostly because we spend a lot of effort avoiding these platforms, and when something bad happens to a person because of it, we can shout, "Ha! My paranoia is justified!"
If you're working day to day as an engineer, you end up mostly thinking in unhappy cases and 99.99% uptime scenarios, so it actually seems like helpful advice.
Well, it depends on what you consider challenging:
Most work in terms of hours spent: compilers (you had to write one from scratch)
Hardest due to inherent difficulty of the material: theory of computation. Turing Machines and the Halting Problem and such weren't too bad (well, duh) but some of the more advanced stuff was pretty challenging, at least to me.
Hardest due to the material being a collection of bizarre recipes and jumping all over the mathematical map: tie between an undergrad numerical methods course and a graduate modeling and simulations course. It wasn't conceptually difficult to write the code, but understanding exactly why it worked was a different story. I've never been good at memorizing stuff unless I understand how it works (advanced statistics suffers from a similar glut of "magic recipes", in my experience).
Edit: the compilers class was the one that's proven to be the most useful over the rest of my life. I've written specialized parsers and so on a bunch of times.
I've never used the stuff from theory of computation again, nor can I imagine that anyone would who wasn't a researcher in that area.
I could see numerical methods being useful if I did a lot of down and dirty work with the physical world, but I mostly haven't done that..
IMO, the FDA's authority should be limited to making sure that the snake oil does indeed contain genuine oil from genuine snakes.
They could put a label on it to the effect of "We don't think this stuff works, and it might even be harmful", but they should not be allowed to ban it outright.
The current situation is one-sided:
FDA approves something harmful -> people are harmed and their friends and family start calling for the FDA's heads.
FDA doesn't approve something helpful -> people are also harmed, but most of them don't even know they were harmed. There's little chance of an angry mob showing up at the FDA's door.
The FDA is biased in favor of rejection, not approval.
Now do his stepchildren, and exactly how much of their net worth came from Bernie's "campaign contributions".
The way the game is often played is to hire other family members as "consultants" at extremely high salaries (Bernie didn't invent this, by any means -- take a look at how many congresscritters have relatives on the campaign payroll) . In theory, you can't spend campaign money on yourself, but paying it to "consultants" is allowed. And if those "consultants" happen to be relatives, and they happen to use some of their "salaries" to buy luxuries for Dear Old Dad, that's perfectly fine.
Another good one is to set your relative, or even yourself, up in some ancillary business (e.g. advertising or printing). The late Oral Roberts (a TV preacher) was the innovator there. He was always crying about how he sent free Bibles and other religious stuff all over the world, and how many millions it cost. This was absolutely true.
What he never mentioned is that his non-profit ministry hired his very-much-for-profit printing company to print all this stuff.
As far as the government goes, there are pretty strict rules against paying actual government money out to relatives (though it does happen). The rules against paying out campaign contributions are a lot more lenient.