• 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: February 13th, 2024
  • cAUzapNEAGLb@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.world•How elderly dementia patients are unwittingly fueling political campaigns
    33·
    6 months ago

    It’s a very long article with many examples, but these highlight well

    One 82-year-old woman, who wore pajamas with holes in them because she didn’t want to spend money on new ones, didn’t realize she had given Republicans more than $350,000 while living in a 1,000 square-foot Baltimore condo since 2020.

    By the time a Taiwanese immigrant from California passed away from lung cancer this year at age 80, she had given away more than $180,000 to Trump’s campaign and a litany of other Republican candidates – writing letters to candidates apologizing for not getting donations to them on time because she was going into heart surgery. She had only $250 in her bank account when she died, leaving her family scrambling to cover the cost of her funeral.

    And a 78-year-old, a widow who limited showers to save on her water bill and canceled her long-term care insurance, didn’t understand why the retirement savings her husband had left her was dwindling so quickly. After CNN reached out to her family, they learned that the woman gave more than $200,000 in donations to Democratic political groups and candidates.

    This whole thing is a plague, citizens United and this concept of pacs, and all this money in politics is absurd. I think in the modern day of internet and with each campaign setting up a website, and normal reporting and debates, town halls, and Rally’s is sufficient, we don’t need all these mailers, and constant ads, and texts, and so on and so on. it’s more just a giant transfer of wealth from the people to networks and ad agencies.

    All this money has turned politics towards sensationalism, and it’s hurting society.

  • cAUzapNEAGLb@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•Suddenly fading out of existence
    0·
    9 months ago

    It stems from a conflict of need and want from what I understand.

    The need for a national id and the refusal of the citizens for a national id. There was a lot of controversy about the SSN because it could be used as an id and the people didn’t want that being so privacy conscious, so they made the numbering system simple and that card fragile to show and dissuade that it isn’t a good id to get the SS passed.

    But of course, there’s still a want/need for some kind of unified id across the nation - so it was used anyway

    And thus we have a terrible id system: flimsy, deterministic, and mostly-unchangable

    If you know the social security number of someone born in your hospital in the same day, it’s likely your ssn’s are right next to each other and could be guessed

    At this point, I don’t think there would be much resistance to a national id, and it would be great for an update that is both securely random, and changeable so that leaking your SSN isn’t such a crazy risk, having it in a laminated card with a chip and electronic signature even better.