My ten-pound fifty-buck CostCo shredder does that. Something larger merely grinds them faster. What other evidence need be shredded? Credit and ID cards; stained underwear; NDA’s and other docs; ‘lost’ diaries and autograph albums; hair clippings; scribbled notes; financial statements; anything with fingerprints.
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It seems like fire is a better candidate for destroying all those types of evidence. And it doesn’t create a paper trail of import documents.
But by and large, criminals are bad at crime. It wouldn’t surprise me if unraveling Epstein’s criminal history is child’s play. It’s the lawyers that are the hard part about bringing him to justice, apparently.
A Hospital? Bars? It sounds as if you DON’T want a private island at all,
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My current shredder has a jammed paper sensor.
Switch on to shred. Switch off to stop. Thus Prone to overheating.
Two things that would impress me about a shredder.
Doesn’t jam. Doesn’t tip over. Yeah, I’m at the low end of the market.
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You might be interested in this… (I don’t always agree with the author or even see what he sees, but I do often find his analyses interesting to read and think about. He uses photos/videos of celebrities, politicians, and people in the news to illustrate various points about body language.)
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That was always a big difference beween LucasArts and Sierra adventure games. Sierra games had a masochistic streak with all their cheap deaths. (But I still love them.)
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Never doubt this. I’ve only known perhaps three people who were “rich”, at least relative to me. Never have I seen such frugalness as from that lot. I’ve never seen a 0$ tip except from these.
It’s probably why they’re rich. They really really care about their money.
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There is a weird divide on this.
I know a guy who was born into a family with a combined income of probably 400-600k a year. He is not frugal at all, but also does not deficit spend. He lives solidly like a yuppie.
A guy I know through him was born into a family with a combined income of millions of dollars per year. He owns a car dealership, but was recently complaining how hard it was to find a good deal on a used pickup truck.
I am not sure what drives a rich person into one category or another.
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The saying in those circles is that the challenge isn’t making one’s fortune but preserving it. The problematic part comes when the wealthy person tries to do the latter by consistently mooching or otherwise taking advantage of others, especially if those others aren’t wealthy (tax cheats fall into this category as well).
A lot of it comes down to upbringing and a sense of perspective. Most smart wealthy people teach their children not to deficit spend as a lifestyle choice, for example.
“Old money” culture also tends to frown on conspicuous consumption to the point where some families seek out beat-up used cars and middle-class homes and thrift-shop clothes and other displays of frugality almost as status symbols. That’s not to say they’re not spending a lot of money on very nice and high-quality things, but a lot of it is deliberately invisible to or hidden from the public. At those levels of wealth, smart people understand that the costs outweigh the benefits and that there’s nothing more to be proved by flaunting it if you got it – especially if you already own or can buy anything you need.
Terry Pratchett’s famous “Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness” discusses this in its extended version, always worth quoting:
When he was a little boy, Sam Vimes had thought that the very rich ate off gold plates and lived in marble houses.
He’d learned something new: the very very rich could afford to be poor. Sybil Ramkin lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side. Women who were merely well-off saved up and bought dresses made of silk edged with lace and pearls, but Lady Ramkin was so rich she could afford to stomp around the place in rubber boots and a tweed skirt that had belonged to her mother. She was so rich she could afford to live on biscuits and cheese sandwiches. She was so rich she lived in three rooms in a thirty-four-roomed mansion; the rest of them were full of very expensive and very old furniture, covered in dust sheets.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
The point was that Sybil Ramkin hardly ever had to buy anything. The mansion was full of this big, solid furniture, bought by her ancestors. It never wore out. She had whole boxes full of jewelry which just seemed to have accumulated over the centuries. Vimes had seen a wine cellar that a regiment of speleologists could get so happily drunk in that they wouldn’t mind that they’d got lost without trace.
Lady Sybil Ramkin lived quite comfortably from day to day by spending, Vimes estimated, about half as much as he did.
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kind of looks like plastic surgery or botox to me. while probably not delibrate he seems to be going for the “joker without makeup” look.
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or they inherited their money like our dear leader. he’s done a bad job of growing his money, and done a great job of wasting it.
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Google Earth sometimes shows older images by default. I’ve occasionally looked at a parcel and been disappointed to see that it still shows what it looked like pre-demolition. Being still curious, I clicked the “Show Historical Imagery” button, and suddenly it shows a later image with current, new buildings.
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https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/12/politics/mnuchin-congress-letter-debt-crisis/index.html
Surprise!
…whiskey sounds good … yeah more of that.
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i know what to do. let’s write another blank check! that’ll solve everything. and if it doesn’t, we can blame it on the freshmen squad over in the house.
the only upside of brave new world was all the drugs. ( i jest. i jest. )
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For me, this has been the most convincing explanation of what Epstein was up to:
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You climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and realise the ultimate Eyes Wide Shut sex cult that you used to fantasise about and people get all squeamish.
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When he posts bail and disappears do we send SEAL team 6 after him. If that’s too expensive, maybe start a GoFundMe to hire a rag tag bunch of ex Army Special Forces and televise it? Maybe call it the A-Team?
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If I were Epstein I might:
- Suicide (no, probably not)
- Flee to North Korean sanctuary
- Plastic surgery; new identity
- Face justice (no, probably not)
- Hire Giuliani for obfuscation
- Marry a cousin; move to Bahrain
- Start a reality TV show
- Start a cosmetics line
- Bust out rapping
What other options exist?
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Going before a court? Letting society see what horrific crimes you committed? Admitting that you hurt other human beings?
Although, I suppose it’s all a good jape… after all, who was hurt but some young girls, with no money, so no one important, right? /s
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