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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • That seems convoluted but also as stated it wouldn’t be a wash.

    A deduction means pretend that portion of income never existed and the taxable portion of it is not charged.

    Then generally the deduction has to be above the standard deduction to make sense to use, and the standard deduction is just so high nowadays.

    So if you claimed a hypothetical deduction of 1,000, then you reduce your tax burden by only 200 or so, assuming you otherwise had like 20 some odd thousand in deductions to get you close to the standard deduction.

    The only way it would be a wash is if it were a refundable tax credit with no qualifications, and that almost never happens for anything. I could imagine a non refundable credit that would make it a wash for anyone with sufficient tax liability.

    However, this would make the tariffs an utterly pointless needless complication, needing a whole lot more accounting by sellers and consumers just to get to a similar and simpler position of not doing the tariffs in the first place.


  • “I don’t think anything went wrong. We just needed more votes,”

    Nothing went wrong except the most plainly important thing to go wrong. Further something that could have actually gone right if they just planned better around one of their members.

    “It was a win-win either way.

    Losing is ok because the Republicans will get blamed… Except this very article where they actually had enough Republicans to get a win and they still boffed it. A rare opportunity for substantiative progress to prove that even as a minority party they can drive common sense legislation and they totally screwed up.



  • I think it was created as a markup to explain why they thought the ambiguous tattoos were problematic, I hope they would have assumed no one would be stupid enough to think he literally had tattoos that managed to be flat perfect text in pure black in a photo.

    But it turns out Trump is literally that stupid. Or it is convenient so he doesn’t have to field answers like “where’s some corroborating evidence to back up the claimed meaning”.

    Of course all of this is almost beside the point. We shouldn’t be doing this in the court of public opinion, it should be in front of a real judge and if deported it should be in compliance with orders that he be deported to anywhere but Salvador, and even if someone deports to El Salvador, we shouldn’t just directly deport straight to a prison that may not even have anything to do with country of origin.



  • There’s a lot of folks who are either.:

    Vote republican by default, but a shock could change them.

    People who vote for or against the status quo based on how the feel things are going. Trump lost in 2020 in part due to people voting against whoever was in office. Hilary Clinton probably would have lost in 2020 had she won in 2016. Trump won in 2024 in part due to similar sentiment to vote out the current party after the inflation that was likely unavoidable consequence of not collapsing from COVID.

    Yes the MAGA cult is unwavering, and they are a huge factor in the GOP primaries and certainly an asset in the general election, but they are not enough to assure an election.


  • The thing was that they resorted to the tan suit and terrorist first bump bullshit because Obama gave them so little to work with. For Trump you didn’t need to waste everyone’s time when his administration is ignoring court orders, arresting judges, declaring warrants and due process unnecessary, and tanking the economy.

    The tan suit stuff may have helped energize the base by preaching to the choir, but everyone else found it ridiculous and made them skeptical of conservative media. When you are inundated nearly daily with real terrible stuff, no need to undermine credibility by latching into this sort of fluff.






  • The problem is when misrepresentations run wild, the other side can highlight examples and say “see, the left is out there lying and twisting the obvious truth”, and destroy the credibility of all the other material.

    Like when Fox News would bash Obama for wearing a Tan suit or fist bumping someone. Any potential legitimate criticism they could relate is undermined by being a laughing stock over such stupid stuff.

    With Obama, I suppose I could get it as a strategy because he didn’t supply enough “juicy” material to be substantive, so they didn’t have much alternative but to try to generate stupid outrage. With Trump, he is constantly blatantly showing maliciousness or incompetence, why bother undermining credibility by wasting time highlighting and trying to distort a rare occurrence of him not being incompetent?





  • Problem is in practice, I suspect something is pretty wrong in most teams.

    Some common examples come to my mind:

    • Management hears “talk about what you’ve done and what you will do” so great time to sit in and take notes for performance review, and it becomes a “make sure management knows you spent all your time and did really impressive stuff” meeting. Also throws a kink in “things I need help with” as there’s always the risk that management decides you aren’t self sufficient enough if they hear you got stuck, so you also need to defend why you got stuck and how it isn’t your fault.
    • The people who feel like everyone needs to know the minutia of their trials and tribulations including all the intermediate dead ends they went down on the way to their final result. Related to the above, but there are people who think to do this even without the need to impress management.
    • The people who cannot stand to “take it offline” and will stop everything to fully work a problem while everyone is still ostensibly supposed to stay in the meeting despite having nothing to do with the two people talking (sometimes even just one, a guy starts talking to himself as he tries to do something live).
    • Groups that are organized but have very little common ground. An “everything must be scrum” company sticks a guy who does stuff like shipping and receiving into a development team and there’s no ‘scrum-like’ interaction to be had and yet, there he is wasting his time and having to talk about stuff no one else on that meeting has a need to hear either.