domain:mattlakeman.org
Rov_Scam
12hr ago
MY brother is unpretentious and got into Wallace after I showed him the essay about the cruise ship that we both quote relentlessly. On year at the beach he read Infinite Jest because he wanted to read Wallace. He not only finished it, he's reread it several times. I think part of it is that none of his friends even know who Wallace is so he came into it as a book written by a writer he found funny (we both have an excessively dry sense of humor) and not as something he felt obligated to read. I started it years ago but with my own knowledge of the book's import I found it impossible to continue, even though my brother insists that it's right up my alley.
Rov_Scam
12hr ago
I think he was referring to a system they have in places like Sweden, where if you're a normal W-2 employee the government would look at your W-2 income and take the standard deductions and do all the stuff that they will correct anyway if you did it differently and didn't get the maximum refund. The first time you claim a child they could keep track of the age and take the deduction every year until 18. If you wanted to take more deductions than they were offering, then you'd file your own return. But most people wouldn't have the need to do that. The predatory thing comes with H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt opening up places in the 'hood where they'll offer to do poor people's taxes so they can charge a percentage of the EITC they recover.
2rafa
12hr ago
“I will flee like a rat to the suburbs and abandon the civilization my forefathers built because getting rid of homeless psychos and dealing with violent crime seems like too much work”
Who can be surprised at 70 years of total failure on the American right when this is the common mindset? Out of sight, out of mind, and all the while you fade into irrelevance.
Markass
12hr ago
Reminds me of when Monsanto's anti-competitive, environment-harming practices directly led to one farmer murdering another. The person put on trial was the murderer, while nothing happened to Monsanto, even though they were so controversial that the jury instructions explicitly prohibited mentioning Monsanto.
It also took me too long to realize that Monsanto being enabled shows how useful all those heckler's veto environmentalist regulations were: Not very.
2rafa
12hr ago
“Full sized” in terms of product volume or selection? In terms of volume of fresh, OK quality food the average Manhattan Whole Foods has more than a huge big box store in a poorer part of the Midwest. It’s bleak out there, the fact that NYC doesn’t have 37 shelves of 48-pack soda isn’t a downside.
2rafa
12hr ago
I just get my food delivered when I want once a week for the in-store price plus a nominal (literally $2) delivery charge, which is viable for the store because of how dense a city is.
TowardsPanna
12hr ago
fate worse than war.
Someone who starts Palantir (amazing how people tell you who they are) seems to be projecting when talking about antichrists and coming evils in peacetime.
Markass
13hr ago
This is half of why Americans are obese.
Obesity is a complicated subject. To claim that this is even half the reason is a high level of hubris.
Markass
13hr ago
The blacks don't help, but this isn't fully true. People prefer living in suburbs and driving cars because it's just better for them. Even if all black people were to disappear tomorrow, there would still be suburbs and cars. At most it would add a marginal amount to the populations of dense cities.
TitaniumButterfly
13hr ago
You're clearly grappling with the way his (uninhibited by resource scarcity) gayness makes you feel. I don't disagree, but if that's how it is we should probably be more willing to generalize.
cjet79
13hr ago
Some Benefits:
- People can be guilty of two crimes when they don't pay taxes: not paying the taxes, and lying about the amount of taxes owed. Which also makes it easier to catch criminals who are making lots of money illegally. (Al Capone Argument)
- Its only hard to pay taxes if you are trying to maximize the amount you are not paying. You can very easily give the maximum amount you suspect you owe, and if you are wrong the government will send you a reimbursement for taxes you overpaid. (Kennedy, do your part argument)
- Special interests can be given special and hard to follow exemptions that are only meant for them, and require a bunch of hoops to claim. You can then write off those estimated tax costs as something you did for the consumer while not having those full costs get reflected in the actual budget. (Cynical jack ass argument)
There are more special interests that benefit from complex tax systems than just H&R block.
OliveTapenade
13hr ago
For what it's worth, I can't imagine the idea of watching a film on a phone or even on a computer monitor. It's practically the only thing I use my television for these days, but I still insist on watching films on a television.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
13hr ago
When someone dies, you don't blame the executor of their will.
If somebody gets murdered, with intent, then you actually do start looking extremely closely at the people who get to profit massively from their death. When the executor of a murder victim's will stands to gain vast sums of money from their will, people will absolutely and instinctively blame said executor - and in this specific case they're actually correct to do so given that the company was driven to the ground on purpose.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
13hr ago
He already has the downside risk of losing his job.
This isn't actually a downside risk - a lot of CEOs have incredibly lavish golden parachute pay clauses. If the company goes to shit and disintegrates because he outsourced the management to CEOgpt while fucking his secretaries and writing racist screeds on the internet he will be rewarded for causing immense damage to the lives of the people working there with financial compensation far in excess of what the average employee earns.
Pigeon
coo coo
13hr ago
The hard part, though, is that if that is true, if you know for certain that they are eating their seed corn, then my friend you have tremendous alpha and should put all your money betting on Microsoft going belly up.
Surely even if this is true, predicting when this will happen is still incredibly difficult?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
13hr ago
In any case, I don’t understand why they should help. Help me or I’ll envy you and make things difficult sounds like extortion.
Because the obscene concentration of wealth that allows those elites to exist requires the existence of a coherent and functioning society. You can't have millionaire layabouts and the idle rich without somebody to actually do the work, and if those people believe that current social arrangements have lost their legitimacy then things can change very, very fast. The French aristocracy didn't give a shit about the concerns of smelly peasants and didn't want to help them out at all, but that famously did not end particularly well for the aristocracy.
Eetan
14hr ago
Can someone please steel-man the American system of making individual citizens responsible for filing their taxes
MODE OF STEEL ON
In a free democratic republic, citizens should be aware about the true cost of state, and if they think it is too high, they should organize and vote for smaller and leaner government.
MODE OF STEEL OFF
Yea, it looks, walks and talks like mob extortion, but, unlike most parts of the system, can be steel manned. Not that it was ever deliberately designed for this reason.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
14hr ago
This is in no way a barrier to a competently written tax code. How, exactly, does the money get to said foreign subsidiary? There is always going to be a point at which the financial resources leave the country and that's where enforcement can happen.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14hr ago
It's just a question of higher familiarity then.
anon_
15hr ago
My city permitting department will inspect the work done according to code. YMMV.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15hr ago
You can't have a wrong opinion, that's not how it works. You can only be wrong about facts like 'X is richer than Y', not opinions like 'I don't like X'.
the EU is just an expression of the Europeans' native urge to bury everything in layers of bureaucracy
White Americans are British and European in ethnic background. There is no 'native urge' in Europe that does not also exist in America, only social, economic and political differences. Going on a boat did not create a new people.
bonsaii
15hr ago
Can someone please steel-man the American system of making individual citizens responsible for filing their taxes in a hopelessly complex tax code, then punishing them for making mistakes? From where I stand, it all just feels like racketeering by H&R Block et al. to extort fees year after year.
Yes, I'd like to be plowed by billionaire cock in the much more authentic BDSM dungeon.
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