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Elderly dementia patients are unwittingly fueling political campaigns

• caekislove 2y ago
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• Mountain_Skies 2y ago
  Terrible, self-indulgent page design. That aside, my parents are around 80 and while neither is showing signs of dementia, dad readily admits he's not as sharp as he used to be. Mom is in denial. For their ages, they're doing pretty well. As far as I know, neither has been victims of scams but it troubles me when I'm at their house and see things like "Congratulations! You just won $10,000" banner ads blinking on their monitors and tablets. Maybe I should set up some kind of network wide ad blocking for them but in general I try not to be intrusive on how they run their lives. I know the day will come when they're not able to and it worries me that my siblings and I might not see it before it's too late. Medical science has done many wonderful things for helping people live longer but it seems more common for our physical bodies to outlive our minds. In that period, there's lots of room for exploitation.
  • PlunderBunny 2y ago
    I don't want this come across the wrong way, but have you tried talking to them about scams, or what they see in the banner ads? It might give you an idea of how credulous they are. My parents are in a similar age group, and I frequently share information about scams with them. I don't expect all the information to stick, but it just keeps re-enforcing the ideas of 'no free lunches', 'too good to be true', 'pressured to act quickly' etc.
  • saltcured 2y ago
    Having seen both of my parents develop dementia at different rates, I'll say that yes it does sneak up. There wasn't a clear day where yesterday they were self-sufficient and now they are not. It is natural for the sufferer to develop coping mechanisms hide problems from themselves and others. The problems have to grow until the coping mechanisms start to collapse, and then suddenly they are much more evident. Another aspect is the child's denial. It is a significant shift in your worldview to see a parent go from being self-sufficient to dependent. To recognize the myriad day to day functions you took for granted that now require a caregiver's involvement. Also, the cognitive problems do not develop as a slow and continuous trend. There are different cycles overlaid with seasons, illnesses, and even time of day. So you see fluctuations in their capacity and returning moments of lucidity and function help sustain denial. I've heard it said, and I agree, the process of caring for someone with dementia includes a grieving process with all the complexities that ever has. You are watching many layers of the person die, sometimes over and over. At times you are faced with the living husk of the person you remember. Or worse, a strange subset of their prior personality traits and memories. It can take a crisis to force the issue, if families get stuck in denial. Sadly, this also makes later caregiver arrangements more difficult. As far as I can tell, the happiest dementia sufferers seem to be ones who were able to transition into a supportive care environment before they progressed too far, so they had the capacity to adapt and familiarize themselves to new routines. Those routines help them cope in later phases. Those who go down kicking and screaming may be stuck with a care environment that seems (to them) threatening and disorienting.
    • ryandrake 2y ago
      Everyone really needs to have an up-to-date Power Of Attorney Directive and a trusted agent who can act on their behalf once they lose their cognitive ability and financial judgment.
      • saltcured 2y ago
        Yes, and also a medical advance directive in most jurisdictions where that is separate from a legal/financial POA.
  • rawgabbit 2y ago
    This is from experience. You should take control of their banking accounts and home ownership now not later. Go to the bank with your parents and tell the bank you need to be added to their account. Talk with a lawyer or nonprofit and figure out how to add your name so your parents cannot literally sign their house away to a con artist.
  • fencepost 2y ago
    If they aren't already using a password manager with an emergency access feature, get them set up with one. As an example, if you use Bitwarden then get a family plan and add them to it - that allows setting an emergency contact who can access or take over the account if needed. 1Password and other competitors should all also have this. The other thing you might do is have their banking and credit card accounts set up to email you transaction notifications - that's obviously more intrusive, but it should let you catch repeating suspicious transactions.
• jnmandal 2y ago
  The state of affairs surrounding this practice as well as the amount of money used up in the election system generally is absolutely ridiculous.
• hluska 2y ago
  One of my good friends is, in his words, older than oxygen. He lives across the street in a senior’s home and I always saw him out for walks. I have a rule - when I see someone enough for them to become a familiar, I introduce myself. So I introduced myself to him and now he sends me a text message a few times a month for a coffee. He was getting close to getting reined in by a scam. It was a Canadian party pulling the same shit as MAGA. He said something really interesting. You’re young and nobody listens to you. You just get dragged around, told where to go and what to say. Then, you hit around 40 and suddenly everyone listens to you. They will stop what they’re doing to cater to you. But then you turn really old, your wife dies and all of a sudden, you have nobody to even drag you around. You’re totally by yourself and day to day, it doesn’t matter if you live or die. He knew it was a scam and knew when it got too expensive so decided to walk. But it was human contact. And as he says, loneliness is worse than being broke. The best part of being friends with him is how the staff treats me at our spot. It’s a pub he used to go to with his wife when she was alive and the entire staff knows him very well. Whenever we have coffee, one of the servers inevitably looks at him, points at me and says “Ray, I see you’re doing your good deed for the day.” Without fail, his eyes twinkle and he replies, “If I don’t teach this young peckerhead a thing or two, we’re all doomed.” I’m not sure there is a moral, but if you happen to see an older adult regularly, stop and talk. You may protect them from scams. You may end up with a close friend. If you’re really lucky, you may even get called “peckerhead.” Edit - Me spell not good.
  • arcanemachiner 2y ago
    Good on you for being a nice human, peckerhead.
    • ianeigorndua 2y ago
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  • gotoeleven 2y ago
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• deleted 2y ago
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• swayvil 2y ago
  I interact with wealthy retired elderly people every day. Yes, they are the #1 prey in our society. They are so harassed. Like wildebeests getting nibbled on by a pack of jackals. Nibbled for their money, time, vote.
  • MisterBastahrd 2y ago
    There used to be a time when retired US politicians with decades of service were still respected in retirement. Granted, this was before Gingrich's hyperpoliticizing of every bit of minutiae in America. Then Fred Thompson, not satisfied with his $250K an hour lobbying gig or his acting career, decided he also needed to start hawking reverse mortgages to the elderly, and that was a wrap. Before people were willing to look past the lobbying... stopped being a thing after ole Fred was caught on TV and radio right next to the gold bouillon sellers.
    • gotoeleven 2y ago
      The Clarence Thomas nomination hearings are I think a better marker for the beginning of our modern era of "hyperpoliticization" of everything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas_Supreme_Court_nomination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas_Supreme_Court_...
      • Clubber 2y ago
        I would opine it was Robert Bork a few years earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork_Supreme_Court_nomination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork_Supreme_Court_nomi...
        • matthewdgreen 2y ago
          One of the pieces of history I didn’t appreciate at the time, because I was just a kid: Bork was Solicitor General in the Nixon administration. When Nixon ordered that his AG fire the Special Prosecutor investigating Watergate, Nixon’s appointed AG and deputy (very ethically) resigned instead. This left Bork as acting AG, and unlike his superiors, Bork was very happy to fire the Special Prosecutor at his boss’s request. In other words, almost everyone in the Nixon administration had more ethics than Bork. What was so disgusting and surprising about the Bork nomination is that it was clearly a reward for that behavior, one that persisted across multiple presidential terms. It sent a message that “no matter how damaging your lack of ethics might seem in the short term, there is a reward for loyalty and willingness to short-circuit the criminal process” that would have felt at home in an organized crime family. The stuff we see today is just a further development of the metastasizing cancer that began right there.
• Apocryphon 2y ago
  You have to wonder how much of the economy similarly relies on uncanceled opt-out services that this demographics never knew it subscribed to.
  • giarc 2y ago
    Not just that demographic, every demographic. There was a Planet Money podcast episode just the other day called The Subscription Trap. The podcast host and the founders of this tool, all seemingly young, tech enabled people all had hundreds (if not thousands) in unknown subscriptions. It's a problem top to bottom.
    • matwood 2y ago
      > tech enabled people all had hundreds (if not thousands) in unknown subscriptions I don't really understand how people can't easily see this on their CC bill(s). You don't even need to check monthly, just every so often and make sure you recognize all the charges.
      • frmersdog 2y ago
        They don't (have to) care. At least in America, the vast majority of people have never felt the pinch of being "broke"-broke. When you have money coming in, you have enough to waste on dumb stuff. Going off my own list: $100/m phone bills when $15/m ones are available (even less, because employee discount!)? Well, it's more convenient (it wasn't, it was just money getting shoveled into the trash). Eating out at lunch? Making food is a chore (actually, stew pots are your friend, Panda Express is not). $200/m for a storage unit isn't reasonable. Neither is a new car note. Overspending on insurance. Monthly media subscriptions. On and on. You don't realize it until the money simply isn't there anymore, and you're forced to make cuts. And it's at that point that you realize, "Dang, I could have had a lot less stress now if I'd been more vigilant about spending money I didn't need to - if I'd just known better - then." But the entire economy essentially encourages and then preys on your apathy and lack of knowledge.^1 By the time you see what's going on, it's too late. You're a bum and no one cares about what you have to say. 1: Actually, this is not in and of itself a bad thing. "Stupid" purchasing decisions keeps artists and artisans in food and home, is the "slack" that keeps labor inefficient enough to be tolerable. The problem is twofold: 1) that corporations systematically prey on this tendency, and 2) its distribution as an ability is lopsided: most people can be extremely frivolous with money, and some can't be frivolous at all, and there's very little middle ground.
• SSJPython 2y ago
  There needs to be public funding of elections. That would go a long way. If we really want reform, the system should be changed from a first-past-the-post presidential system to a parliamentary system with party-list proportional representation. Neither system is perfect, but the latter captures a wider range of views within society. Germany is a stable constitutional federal republic with proportional representation and power vested in the Bundestag. No reason why the US can't have the same.
  • doctorpangloss 2y ago
    Ah yes, Germany, the most stable, fair, well run and well represented government in history.
  • ETH_start 2y ago
    Germany affords no Freedom of Speech and makes major policy blunders, like shutting off all of its nuclear power plants. It's not a country for the US to emulate.
  • ianeigorndua 2y ago
    Lol, Germany was bought and paid for decades ago and the party with the most political power is the Hells Angels. They even got their rivals federally banned, even though they are not!
    • pc86 2y ago
      This comment reads like LLM-generated text, but like... a pretty old version where it's basically MCMC text generation.
      • ianeigorndua 2y ago
        You read like a HAMC damage control bot. I am sick of being lorded over by criminals hiding in plain sight, it is why the economy sucks. They are sucking on it like leeches.
        • 2y ago
• wiredfool 2y ago
  One of those crap jobs I had when I was young was a temp worker in a lock box that processed political contributions (early 90's). There would be trays of mail coming in from various campaigns, for various orgs (3 or 4, both Democratic and Repubican). Surveys were big -- and people would write all over them. But the first thing that happened was the money was pulled out and deposited. The bundles of surveys might have been looked at. It was depressing as hell. You could tell people were looking for someone to listen. And as far as I know, they only reached someone doing a buck over minimum wage, who had to process x hundred envelopes per hour. Now, of course, it's been streamlined -- there aren't checks anymore so it's all that much faster for the more efficient clearing of the marks money.
  • thunky 2y ago
    This reminds me of how absentee voting works. For example, in 2020 New York state threw 3.62% of absentee ballots in the trash. https://elections-blog.mit.edu/articles/deep-dive-absentee-ballot-rejection-2020-general-election https://elections-blog.mit.edu/articles/deep-dive-absentee-b... Some legitimately discarded I'm sure, but some were thrown out because a human thought the signature was off. And who knows if they got it right: strictly scrutinized the ballots that were returned, and often did not even notify absentee voters that their ballot was rejected because of an administrative deficiency Plus this type of thing happens all the time (happened to me this year in a different state): https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/03/21/incorrect-absentee-ballots-sent-to-165-voters-in-milwaukee/73053901007/ https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/...
• aussieguy1234 2y ago
  One possible idea is to simply publicly fund the political parties and do away with political donations entirely. They're an essential part of your democratic system of government and could therefore be considered an essential service, so they would be funded in the same way as any other essential service. That would not only solve this problem but also prevent the corporate lobbyists from having too much influence and corrupting the system. Hopefully it'll be capped and that will mean less ads everywhere.
  • maxerickson 2y ago
    In the US, with the first amendment, it's hard to ban private spending.
    • jgeada 2y ago
      Only since the current SC redefined money as speech, wasn't a problem for the first couple of hundred of years when saner justices prevailed.
      • maxerickson 2y ago
        Well, I did say spending and not campaign contributions. How do you ban a candidate from paying for air time like Ross Perot did?
  • pessimizer 2y ago
    > One possible idea is to simply publicly fund the political parties and do away with political donations entirely. No, political parties should be abolished. People can get together, call themselves whatever they want, and recommend people as candidates for office, but these private organizations should not be institutionalized in law or supported in any way. We shouldn't even be helping with their primaries. Law shouldn't recognize anything called a "political party" or have any rules governing them. They are not essential, they are corrupting.
    • aussieguy1234 2y ago
• Animats 2y ago
  THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING. YOUR GOP INNER CIRCLE LEADER MEMBERSHIP IS ABOUT TO BE DEACTIVATED.
• ein0p 2y ago
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  • keybored 2y ago
    Where’s the joke?
• iwontberude 2y ago
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  • pc86 2y ago
    You have no idea what dementia is.
    • deleted 2y ago
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    • iwontberude 2y ago
      You must realize that dementia patients aren't blank canvases and their delusions are based on the people they were before the disease struck. If you don't work on yourself before its too late, then you will be exposed by the disease. It's not difficult to understand.
  • kstrauser 2y ago
    I am very sympathetic to this. However, much of that hate is born of fear. When some sociopath deliberately and systematically tells old people that various "they" are coming for them, can we really blame the ones that react in terror with the hope that someone will protect them? Dementia is an excuse. It may be the only excuse. If someone isn't thinking clearly, we can't get mad at them for not thinking clearly.
    • iwontberude 2y ago
      Fear is not an excuse and I’m not mad at them. Actions have consequences and ignorance is no excuse for people causing harm. They no longer should be allowed to exert influence if they don’t have agency. They must be handled in a way that is beneficial to society overall, and one way is to stop making excuses for them and act to remove their destructive capabilities.
• doctorpangloss 2y ago
  The simple fact that you can spend $1 in Meta ads to raise $1.02 in political contributions, at the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars, is fueling political campaigns.
  • mordechai9000 2y ago
    Maybe 10 years ago there was a contentious Senate race here in my state. They spent tons of money courting voters, with ads in all kinds of media and a non-stop brigade of earnest young people (volunteers? paid?) going door to door and harassing people who hadn't voted early. This year is somewhat similar, except the local media market is dead and a lions share of the money is going to 2 tech companies. I read they took 78% in the 2020 election cycle. You can guess which 2 companies those are.
    • morkalork 2y ago
      Anyone else noticed the election has trashed your ad budgets? Doing CPC and CPM when suddenly hundreds of millions are being dumped across the board kinda sucks.
      • soared 2y ago
        Yeah really hurt branding/prospecting - haven’t seen the impact for retargeting yet since I run super high bids there but surely will be affected soon. Wish my employer took on political clients - such easy free money.
    • doctorpangloss 2y ago
      Nobody cares about courting voters. The least competitive races in America are in Los Angeles and New York. They’re not advertising presidential candidates there to court voters. The votes don’t matter. They want a $25 donation, that they’ll plow $20 of back into more ads, and pocket $5 on overhead.
• neilv 2y ago
  Question for historians... Was there a time in the US that preying upon the elderly for political campaign funding like this would've been met with universal (both sides of the aisle) outrage, and probably cost the parties doing it many elections?
• crooked-v 2y ago
  Endless political spam texts are infuriating enough even for the mentally fit. I actively advise people against making political donations now unless they're extremely careful about it, because they will be hounded by political groups for literally the rest of their lives (literally literally, not figuratively literally) if they ever share any kind of contact information.
  • Animats 2y ago
    STOP seems to work.
    • SoftTalker 2y ago
      I believe it's legally required to?
      • Animats 2y ago
        The Telephone Consumer Protection Act applies only to "commercial" messages. Political ads are technically exempt, as a free speech issue. But because political ads go out via the usual SMS spam services, STOP usually works anyway. The services don't want their outgoing lines blocked.
  • water-data-dude 2y ago
    This year when I checked my voter registration I noticed that the “phone number” field in my profile was not marked as required, and there was a little info icon that said “this is public information” when I clicked on it. I removed my phone number and the number of text messages diminished (not all the way, but noticeably better). Not a magic bullet, but worth checking.
  • altruios 2y ago
    What's the difference between a scam text posing as a political fundraising text and a political fundraising text in appearance? How do you know any of the political fundraising texts with weird links are legitimate? That's the neat part: you don't.
• from-nibly 2y ago
  The secret band of robbers and murderers robbing someone?! No way!
• deleted 2y ago
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• rat87 2y ago
  The top text says Republican and Democratic campaigns but later on it admits > most often to Republican candidates and that for Democrats it was mostly left leaning pacs instead of democratic candidates. And to what extent does the head swindler in chief contribute to this attitude? > The biggest beneficiary of the small-dollar donations from unwitting donors identified by CNN was Donald Trump