sacks2k

"It's frankly quite embarassing that the holder of that office, an office used to be held by people you'd expect to show leadership and some sort of level-headedness, is basically getting a pass that he behaves like a clown, a very entitled kindergartner, and... what else can I compare him to?"

As compared to pretty much every Democrat in every office for the past 4 years calling Trump supporters Nazis and saying and tweeting things just as bad if not worse? Why are you giving them a pass?

"Biden's lead in each of the states being challenged are around a few thousand, and fraud that large is very hard to hide. So far Team Total Landscaping has failed 30+ legal challenges because they could only bring trivial bullshit before the judges, and the judges have mostly thrown their cases out."

This may be true, but it needs to be sorted out. They are most likely buying time while they put together the much bigger case that ties everything together.

I personally found dead people that voted in Multiple states that received a ballot. This was based on SSN, address, name, and birthday. If I could find a dozen of these people without much effort, I can't imagine the amount of dead people that actually cast a ballot. How does this even happen? Isn't anyone the least bit curious??

"See above. Giuliani is apparently charging the campaign $20,000 a day [0] (ok he's since issued a denial[1]) and he's the one whispering to Trump that there was fraud. Well done Rudy you scumbag, you're scamming the scammer. But I doubt you'll ever see the money, but maybe you'll be able to go to some nice dinners and pay with IOUs saying "Yeah the Trump 2020 campaign owes me a million dollars, when they pay me, I'll pay you, we good here?".

For $20,000 a day, I'd go on stage and scream quotes from My Cousin Vinny as well, aren't we all just prostitutes."

Now you lost me. You're high on emotions, low on facts.

"You are talking to someone who believes Trump when he says that he will release his tax returns."

I'm an individual, not a group. You have no idea what I believe about Trump's tax returns.

I expected to have intelligent conversations/discussions here on HN, but all the half-hearted, biased responses I'm seeing, and the downvoting, tells me that it's probably not going to happen.

When they are doxxed and their families are threatened (I saw the videos making the rounds and the tweets afterwards), it doesn't make it okay.

" refused to certify black communities after they already certified white communities with worse discrepancies"

Everything isn't attributed to race. You are trying to tell us the intent of these individuals without knowing what they are actually thinking or why they chose to make this decision. I suppose this is the definition of bias.

"Also one of them was found with racist memes and Qanon conspiracy theories on their Facebook"

Many Democrat officials still believe the Russian collusion conspiracy theory. Should we discount everything they say as well?

Trump can run his mouth off, but it doesn't mean there isn't voter fraud. His attorneys are the ones that are collecting evidence and will present them to the courts.

I read through it until you tried to say that Donald Trump is staging coup. This just isn't true. He's using every legal option available to him to investigate oddities in an election. This is the way things should be done.

What's unbelievable is that there are countless examples of first-hand accounts of voter fraud and Democrats don't want it investigated and are outright attacking anyone for even suggesting it.

Governor Whitmer, for example, publicly stated that the two people that didn't want to certify the election were racist for doing so. This was after they were attacked, doxxed, and shamed for only wanting an investigation into the many allegations we have been seeing since election day. Does this sound like Democracy? It sounds like mob tactics to me.

If there is no investigation, then the Democrats staged a coup and it proves all along that most people on the left don't care about justice or fairness, they only care about being right and getting power.

Trump may very well have lost, but I want to ensure the future integrity of our elections.

I think the problem I have with the culture shift is that it's not really fair or balanced. Trump supporters get death threats, are called some of the worst names, and are doxxed online. It's been happening for 4 years and the media/tech community just ignores it.

There is even a new website that will be dedicated to doxxing Trump supporters and encouraging 'aggressive protesting' at their home.

This is more about getting rid of your political enemies and taking power than giving a shit about feelings and the way we treat each other, which is why it won't ever stop.

All you need is a Russian IP address and you too can be Russian.

The only thing killing book selling is the publishers.

I was involved in the book industry until 2018. In June of that year, the publishers went on a suing spree and not only went after book sellers selling used books online, but Amazon, and school book stores on campus.

Amazon now has locked categories for specific books. To sell them at all, you need to have proof of purchase, directly from the publisher. Nobody will have this, so they are effectively banned, unless you are the publisher. Its also a way for the publishers to profit from the second-hand market (aside from requiring access codes that cost more than the book itself).

The same thing happened with DVD/movies. You now can't sell them at all on Amazon without proof of purchase from a licensed distributor.

My 'side project' turned into a full-time business for 5+ years and it was making a million dollars in sales/year at one point in time.

It really depends on your goals. My goal has always been to have my own business, so I put lots of time and energy into side projects.

If I only wanted to have a career, I probably would use that time and energy on something more career-oriented.

I could write my own device drivers. It's not something I should have to do to get my video card working correctly.

I would rather spend the time on my own projects.

Desktop Linux still sucks.

I used various flavors like Ubuntu for the past 8 years and finally got tired of the half-finished UIs, random bugs that were never fixed, and breaking issues with WINE when I upgraded (and had to spend hours of my free time trying to figure it out).

This, in addition to all sorts of driver issues over the years where I had to download test drivers and compile it myself to get it working has made me never look back.

My new setup is a windows 10 machine with the latest version of Ubuntu running (command line only) on Vmware workstation.

I get all of the stability of a windows machine and can still run all of my favorite Linux apps.

The Windows subsystem for Linux also works pretty well for most things.

I also wonder if it has to do with the anti-commercial stance from most people in the Linux community. Besides a couple of niche apps, most open source is not polished in any way and since many OSS developer have day jobs, have no real incentive to fix a specific bug/issue.

Working from home has been great for me. I'm making more money now than before Covid.

really? And many thousands of protesters all across the country (many not wearing masks and certainly not social distancing) aren't a 'superspreading event'?

I don't think I've even seen one article mentioning it...because racism.

It makes my job easier. I can get my job done in a few hours with a framework rather than toil away for a much longer amount of time writing efficient and fast code.

I feel like it's the early 2000s again. Instead of only having to know a little html, you just need to be able to mash together a couple of frameworks and you can make a good living.

"Small to medium sized businesses rarely deal with scaling or optimization problems anymore"

This is obvious when you look at any modern web framework (back-end or front-end). Companies would just rather throw hardware at the problem and use a bloated, inefficient framework that makes hundreds of extra calls and overly-complex caching mechanisms.

"Looking back we had no idea how close we were to the end"

This happened to me as well. My brother passed at age 47 in 2013. He was initially diagnosed with stage 2 colon cancer and things seemed to be going alright for about a year.

The issue was that the tumor was near a major blood vessel and surgery failed because they were afraid he would bleed to death.

Even after this failed surgery, we had hope with some experimental treatments. He lasted another year.

After a couple of rounds of chemo, he went from bad to worse within a couple of weeks. I had never experienced death like this before and it all came a a shock to me how quickly he passed away.

The worst part is that he fought the idea of death to the very end (I'm sure we all do). There were no plans for his one-man successful business and his wife had to get all of his passwords for important accounts when he was delirious from all of the drugs in his system and nearly on his death bed. He truly thought he would beat it.

The aftermath was like a bomb went off in our family.

His wife begged me to help her with his business on the day of the funeral. I realized he had been neglecting customers for 6 months+ (this is completely understandable, given his condition) and they were screaming for their money back. I spent many weeks/weekends/long nights cleaning up the business and getting the business back to a reasonable level, gaining back customers that would have been lost. This was all for free, to help her (and his kids) out. I explained to her that future work would not be free.

I also had to help her return all kinds of electronics that he bought while he was on chemo drugs. He managed to rack up $50,000 in bills because he would forget that he ordered something..and order 10 of them.

To this day, I'm not sure how she didn't notice all of these amazon packages coming to the door and thinking nothing of it.

After this was done, I told his wife that if she wanted me to continue with this business arrangement, I would need to be a partner in the business. She not only didn't want to do this, but told me I only 'answered emails' and didn't do any actual work, which was clearly not true.

She wanted to give me a free cell phone and pay me around $10/hour as compensation for future work. It was also explained that she had contacted a lawyer and it was stressed that all of the intellectual property from the business was not mine. Kind of strange to me to already assume I'm going to steal intellectual property from you when I just saved you many thousands of dollars and your business..for free.

At this point you may be thinking she's just naive and may not understand the work involved. She worked in the computer industry for a decade. This is how she met my brother. She understands the work it takes to run his business and only wanted to take advantage of me.

As an aside, my brothers business involves: tech support, software development of multiple products in at least 3 languages, and knowing the business. I have the ability do do all three, since I have been in the software/tech industry for the past 2 decades and have owned multiple successful companies. Him and I were very close and I had lots of knowledge about his business and what it entailed. We had ongoing tech discussions through email/chats/in-person for many years.

He was the one that bought me my first computer and was my mentor.

4 months later, she emailed me a contract with a proposal. I would get 5% of the profits for working on it full-time and her kids would own 100% of the business. This was a slap in my face and I declined the offer. With the declining profits in the business, this would have been like working at

The problem is that I would need to work on it full-time to actually save it from failure. If I signed the contract, only worked on it part-time, and it failed, I would be blamed. I also don't like to half-ass anything...especially when it comes to running a business.

She then proceeded to get anyone she could find to work on the business for free and started creating a wedge in my immediate family by spreading false information about the situation. She ended up roping in one of his clients, who had become a friend, to answer all emails for free.

She describes him as a 'good, christian, man'. The funny part is that she was never that religious..and I've known her for 25 years. One of her greatest traits is the ability to manipulate people. All of her friends are people that can do things for her. If she can't use you for something, you are cast off and ignored. She especially likes networking with anyone that has lots of money.

Fast forward to 2020 and the website is in terrible shape. A 7+ year out-of-date website that keeps getting hacked and badly mis-configured DNS records. I told her how to fix these on the first day, but my advice was ignored. I can only imagine how insecure the actual product is, since there have been no updates in all this time.

I also found out my other brother has been helping her for free and outright lying to me about it. I overheard a conversation a couple of days ago that they wanted to keep secret from me. He also has no idea what he's doing and badly butchered the site...but the price for his services is perfect (free).

I just wish my brother would have admit to himself that he may die and specifically write out his wishes for the business in his will. I think it would have prevented this entire situation.

I should probably thank him. It showed me that his wife is still the evil, conniving woman that she was many years ago and that she never really changed..she only got better at hiding it before he died.

But there's now these lingering issues at all family gatherings.

I now own two successful companies. I don't think I would have ever gotten to this level of success, even with a partnership in my brother's company and a business partner that would only fight me on every important decision.

I used to have an OG hotmail account. I created it when hotmail was a really small operation.

I used to receive 1000s of email per day for the wrong person, including chat requests from MSN messenger.

I eventually traded for 10 invites in a forum when gmail.com was invite only.

Best trade ever.

Lax voter ID laws and making it really easy to steal votes through the mail is a good start.

I find it odd that seemingly intelligent people ignore these glaring security holes to further their own political agenda.

"Wrong. The way to fix the problem is to organize. Collective action works."

Why would I want to do that? I already make many multiple times more than my peers due to my specialized skill set.

I remember my first job out of college. Somehow, salaries got leaked and I was making 40% more than my colleague, in the same position (he sat right next to me).

The difference was my experience and negotiating skills.

'Collective action' as you say just adds a middleman that won't do much for me..except prevent me from getting a raise on my own terms.

Again, no thanks.

This will only hurt employee salaries. If all salaries were public, there would be no negotiating and they it would make them based on position rather than individual (IE: the lowest it can possibly be).

Companies will just show you the public chart if you try to negotiate.

Want to fix the problem? Learn how to negotiate your value to a company. This skill comes in handy in pretty much all aspects of life.

"You should really let go of that folclore because it makes absolutely no sense at all and has absolutely zero connection to the real world."

You mean the 3 decades I dealt with unions?

"Unions are about employee representation and negotiating power."

In theory, they were there to help employees. In practice, they are just as corrupt as any large organization and only hurt companies that have to deal with them.

"They are the only way to create change such as limiting working hours and demand safe working conditions and cut down on arbitrarily firing people for no reason."

The only way? Please. We have federal and state employment laws that protect all works. No unions required.

"Without unions you have zero power. With an underperforming union you have some power. Sounds like even a bad union is progress."

If you are a good employee, you have plenty of power. If you are bad and under performing, you need the protection by the unions.

In countries that have really string unions, it's getting to the point where you won't get hired at all without experience because firing an employee involves a court case and lots of red tape. This resulted in protests/riots in Sweden about 5 or 6 years ago.

It also makes a company less competitive in the international marketplace. Now that the Internet has opened up commerce internationally, companies that pay unskilled workers 4x what they are actually worth don't do so well.

It's difficult for me to change my views on this when I've seen the rampant corruption first-hand and the cancerous like effect unions have on a company over time.

The core of a union is bad for workers that excel You won't get paid what you are worth and will get held back when you want a raise. In almost all unions that I've encountered, if you want a raise, it's as a collective.

They also prevent technological advances and it only makes things more expensive for the consumer (Who do you think is fighting Uber and Lyft in major cities? Taxicab unions that were fleecing customers for decades and didn't need to add any convenience to customeers due to massive monopolies and the medallion system).

We also can't forget the police unions, which very system contributes to not firing bad cops..which results in brutality. This is never mentioned in our current discussions on race because the progressives in this country love unions and don't want anything to prevent their mass acceptance.

Unions are great for low-performing workers that get guaranteed raises and can't be fired for complete and utter incompetence.

There are plenty of people wanting to emigrate to the US legally, so it's a win-win for the country.

The liberal answer is always violence. See: Portland and Seattle.

So what happened to social distancing and masks? Is Covid not that serious?

Some protesters are wearing masks, but it's by no means the majority.

I've been working remotely for 10 years. Well before Covid.

The only reason I ever wanted to work remotely is so I could juggle my side businesses and work at the same time, without wasting any commute time or using company equipment. When I first started out, it was so I could travel around Asia for a couple of years.

Now, it allows me to spend more time with my family. I see my daughter all throughout the day and it's great.

The downsides are that you just don't get those close relationships with co-workers. If you need that social aspect of work, it will be very difficult (and possibly depressing).

While I believe this 'error' was corrected, this only goes to show you the power big tech companies like Google and Facebook have over our lives and all future elections.

Russia's influence is nothing compared to the regular censorship and manipulation of the information we see on a daily basis.

Many may be fine with it, because current big tech companies agrees with their point of view.

The danger is when they don't.

To have a safe society, you need to either have lots of surveillance, so people know they are being watched and will think twice about committing crimes (countries with very string gun laws like England and Australia have very strong surveillance systems in place) or the ability for anyone to defend themselves legally against said criminal.

When you try yo get rid of both guns and surveillance, it only increases the crime rate and hurts innocent people.

Very large cities like New York and Chicago are seeing this in action right now. Police are either quitting, not working, and are being defunded as we speak. New york and Chicago had record crime rate increases, including murder.

I started dropshipping in 2009 and it was my first business. I had some money in the bank, but used credit cards to fund my operation.

I never had to spend money on ads because I used existing marketplaces which essentially had built-in marketing. I wrote software that allowed me to add a massive amount of products, sync pricing, and remove products when they were no longer available.

It worked surprisingly well and I was able to make a decent living for about 5 years. It was by no means a way to passively make money. I was working 50-60 hours/week to keep everything running smoothly and manage customer questions and returns.

I eventually gave it up and moved onto to other ways of making more money with less hassle. It's a time sink unless you are able to scale it to millions of dollars and hire employees to manage customer support.

Payment providers also really don't like dropshippers. I was constantly fighting to get my money transferred (I once had $50,000 held for over 2 months) and bending over backwards to make my customers happy.

You will also pay a certain percentage in returns and lost orders. If you are dropshipping from overseas, you will need to get really good with dealing with customs issues, making sure you aren't selling counterfeits, and making sure your supplier is actually telling the truth about their products and shipping them out consistently.

It's also really easy for suppliers to steal your customers. It's much better to have all of your products shipped to you and then white label them/ship them out to your customers directly.

"right-wingnuts are the top 10 shares every single day every day on Faceboook so we no longer wanna hang out on it"

I'm not sure which Facebook you're using, but I certainly don't see anything shared by 'right-wingnuts' going very far. In fact, it's usually silenced and removed almost immediately.

I actually had to stop using Facebook over the past couple of months because of all the left-wing nut job ideas that seem to have become mainstream like the hundreds of thousands of protesters around the US that spread Covid by not wearing masks and are now trying to blame business owners and Republicans. Science and facts seem to now be a thing of the past.

It's also very difficult to have any actual opinions about any current events, especially of you are not African American and disagree with any of the current narratives the mainstream media is attempting to shove down our throats.

Sure you can have an opinion, but if the wrong person sees it, they will attempt to get you fired from your job and shame people into de-friending you. It's the 2020 Salem witch trials.