Now don't get me wrong, given how often legislation in the USA and the UK seems to get rubber-stamped by members of the legislative body who did not (and in some cases could not have) actually read it, I think there's something structurally wrong with at least these two governments, where the senators and MPs are more like overpaid customer support agents and less like the legal/constitutional equivalent of software engineers doing code review or maintaining system architecture, but conditional on if we actually want the elected representatives to be the people's preferred choices amongst the best legal minds available, we have to pay enough to encourage… actually, even before that, even just to get the attention of the top m=contested_seats candidates whose views allow them to comfortably be members of each of the n=num_parties.
Now, I don't know what that pay rate is, and ChatGPT's guess would be better than mine, so the best I can do is link to a page that I only found because ChatGPT gave me a searchable phrase, "magic circle law firm": https://www.allaboutlaw.co.uk/school-leaver-law-careers/beco...
That suggests >>£1M/year in the UK. I assume the USA is more.
Consider: would you take a 90% pay-cut to do your current day job but for the public good?
We're building a lightweight collector (RTCollector) you can run inside the air-gapped environment. It can read from local cert stores (JKS, PKCS#12, PEM, etc.), extract metadata like expiration date and fingerprint (no private keys or cert contents), and send it out securely when outbound connectivity is available.
We already have an api endpoint in place, so you can push data using Python, Bash, curl, or anything else that fits your workflow. No agent required, just a simple POST.
That’s a fair question, and in theory, yes, you could manually track internal certs based on issue date.
But in practice, large or long-running environments rarely have clean cert inventories. You get:
- Internal CA sprawl (and no single source of truth)
Certs embedded in keystores, containers, or staging systems that nobody owns anymore
- “Temporary” certs that live on for years
- People leaving without handing off cert responsibilities
We’re not automating monitoring because it’s hard, we’re doing it because teams forget.
And forgetting is what causes outages, broken mTLS, and failed compliance audits, even in air-gapped setups. I have a few horror story on PCI environments.
Automation helps catch the edge cases before they become fire drills.
To be fair 99 Bananas still tastes like ass with a hint of incredible artificial banana.
Also the cultural aspect is just different. It is generally harder for kids to get alcohol in my experience and also you (usually) don’t carry a bottle of 99 bananas and swig it every few minutes out in public.
Perhaps most importantly is that alcohol doesn’t contain nicotine. People get addicted to alcohol but not in the same way people get addicted to nicotine.
I don't know. But they clearly don't have a lot of money, a refined pallet, and don't mind crazy flavors. Everyone I know seemed to have tried it in a particular time in their lives, and oddly they don't seem to drink it anymore.
PA Dutch at home but they are certainly taught English in their schools, they do in fact interact with their local communities and would need to know it.
It is not typical to get into multiple 10s. Generally speaking you'd only use that kinda cash in a private transaction, some people just find it more appealing in a deal. One less thing to "go wrong" I guess.
There generally isn't a good reason and that's most of the logic to the forfeiture. Its not in the bank because someone didn't want to disclose were it came from (required in deposits in more than 10k USD).
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