Alex Holz comments

This reminds me of the answer to the old question, "How did you go bankrupt?" "Really slowly, for a long time, and then all at once."

I'm not exactly sure what this article is saying. "Getting your news from Facebook" is sort of misleading. People share stuff they think is interesting on their Facebook page. It's really just a big virtual water cooler to socialize around. The news itself is usually just short summaries with links to the source material. Facebook isn't writing the news. Facebook users aren't writing the news. They're just choosing what to pay attention to. I don't think that much has changed, except that Facebook skims the ad revenue.

Because of the age of the people mentioned in the story, I wondered about early-onset dementia or Alzheimer's. I know a family in a similar situation. Both the husband and wife retired around the same time, and were home all the time all of a sudden. They had teen children, but the husband was much older. They began to fight, really bitterly, all of a sudden.

They went through all sorts of things to try to work things out, but the man, especially, was prone to rages. It turns out, he had the early stages of Alzheimers, but it's really hard to diagnose early on. They weren't fighting because they were together all the time. Being together all the time just made the problem come to the fore faster. They went to marriage counselors, and one of them asked the wife if she noticed any physical changes in her husband to go with the changes in his mood. She said that while her husband was always really fit and strong, he was starting to walk much more slowly, and was sort of unsteady. It turns out that might be a marker for dementia. http://caregivingforyou.com/can-walking-more-slowly-indicate-alzheimers-disease/The counselor suggested they go to a doctor that specializes in identifying dementia. Sure enough, that was what it was. The poor fellow eventually needed to be institutionalized.

He was one of those lovely actors that you'd recognize as "that guy," because you couldn't remember his name right off, but you had seen in a hundred movies and TV show. RIP

In American suburbs, the old joke was that the only reason to lock your door was to let your friends know you weren't home. Times have changed.

Sooner or later all these giant conglomerates own so many unrelated businesses that a boost in one is always offset in a loss in another. There's only so much growth that can be achieved by acquiring companies. When the United States broke up the Standard Oil trust, all the separate pieces of the company boomed. These companies are too big for their own good.

I think lying about mileage is a lot worse than when the Germans cheated the emissions tests. A company has to be very careful what it promises to customers. People have a long memory for stuff like that, and it can take a long time for the brand to recover.

This is a great upgrade on an already great product. We use a Plex server along with an old Roku box to watch all our video, and the addition of a headphone jack will make it possible to watch a movie late at night without waking others in the house. I can't believe how inexpensive the USB stick is,either.

I read an article in Consumer Reports last August that Sharp was selling their TV business to Hisense, which is a Chinese company. This must be the other shoe to drop. I don't even know what Sharp makes anymore. Back in the day, they made the best television sets in the world, and they were affordable.

It's really not possible to tell what was going on in that family from the facts as presented. All we know is the poor little child's last thought on Earth was that his mother was murdering him. What a terrible thing.