Erm, I wasn't talking about the Ultimate universe. I have no problem with anything going on over there.
I'm talking about the normal Marvel universe, where they magically erased Spider-Man's marriage to Mary Jane. (A marriage, which should be noted, fans had no problems with for two decades.)
And, frankly, the existence of Ultimate Spider-Man makes this even more absurd. If people wanted to read single, young Spider-Man, they know where to get him!
At the same time, they also erased public knowledge of his identity. That I don't have a problem with, that was necessary to actually continue the story. As much as they like to tease unmaskings, we know they can't really do it, and no one minds changing stuff that was that recent. Although if they were going to replace Peter, that also would be a great in-story reason to do it.
And they also brought back Harry Osbourne, which is, meh. You expect people to come back from the dead in comics, and changing history so he's 'really' been around the entire time, instead of just resurrecting him...whatever.
Erasing two decades of married continuity, though, is utter bullshit.
I think a of the posters replying to me took my numbers a bit too seriously. 20% less was actually a very conservative estimate. In my state, lump sum people take about 40% less.
Making that up would require something like a 5% interest rate. Which I guess you can get...but you can hardly get better. (As someone pointed out, it's entirely possible that this is the state investing it for you.)
Plus you've got the tax problem on top of that, although that varies based on exactly how much you won. Something like $15 million, it's going to make a large difference. The tax difference between $500 thousand a year for 30 years and $8 million all at once...the later is going to taxed at essentially 35%, whereas the former is closer to 30%.
Something like $100 million, no, the taxes really don't differ either way.
Although with an annuity, you at least have the time and ability to set up charitable donations and reduce your tax load somewhat each year.
Then again there's the question of whether you could borrow against the future income from the the periodic payments, but this strikes me as unlikely to be workable; quick googling suggests that an income stream from lottery winnings are typically not transferable or even inheritable, which suggests to me that you won't be able to take a secured loan against it.
There are plenty of people offering absurd loans to lottery winners. And ready to sue for their money back.
Whether or not there are any actual ethical people doing so, I don't know.
Without hitting the Google search the other respondent has linked, money laundering via lottery would be a case of buying a lot of tickets, then when challenged regarding your income point at all the winning tickets.
All instances of people using the lottery for money laundering are when criminal track down and purchase (at slightly above face value) winning tickets from the winners. Showing a winning lottery ticket to the IRS does make the audit go away. (Of course, those poor saps who sold their ticket are now in trouble trying to explain where their money came from.)
No one purchases lottery tickets at a store to launder money at all. This is because the IRS simply will not fold when you wave losing lottery tickets at it, and claim you had others that won a lot. They will laugh at you. I love how people here seem to think the IRS is a bunch of morons, or that they have to accept whatever strange story people have invented to justify their money.
And it seems a very strange idea that you'd need some losing tickets to justify it, anyway. Who the fuck keeps losing lottery tickets? Or what if you bought ten lottery tickets and won $1000 on each of them, so you didn't have any 'losing' tickets? Seriously, this entire premise is idiotic.
Money laundering is used to create paper trails of where money comes from. A few losing lottery tickets is not a paper trail of where the money came from...it certainly didn't come from any losing tickets at all!
You realize that none of those results are about anyone actually doing it, right?
A few are about someone hypothetically doing what was spoke of, which is rightly shot down on exactly the grounds I said.
A few more are about schemes that have criminals use actual lottery winners to launder money. They buy winning tickets from lottery winners, so now the lottery winner has to explain where the money came from, instead of them.
There are no examples of people purchasing tickets with the intent of pointing at losing tickets to explain their winnings.
The fact that a google search returns results does not actually mean people do what you have searched for.
...is they essentially undid all of Peter's character development, erased his marriage, made him back to a 'single nerdy guy'...and then killed him off and replaced him.
Hey, idiots? Why not just, I dunno, injure him, or remove his powers, or something, and let him retire in peace with his wife? And then have a new guy take over?
Yes, yes I'm aware Peter will probably be back from the dead, and take back up his position, but, seriously. Either you keep the character as he's changed and grown over the years, or you should just let him walk off into the sunset and bring in some new young single person for people to relate to. You don't rewrite his life and then kill him off and then bring in someone new.
What are you talking about? Why not just declare your income?
The idea that somehow need to 'prove' your income is nonsense.
The IRS cares when your stated income does not match what you own. If you care whether or not the IRS cares, all you have to do is declare the income.
Or are you under the impression you can't declare illegal income? Yes, you really can. You can even put 'Criminal activities' right there on your tax form, if you want, although most criminals would come up with something else. (Like 'handyman' or 'escort'.)
Not lottery winnings, though, that's insane. In fact, if you start reporting large lottery wins, the IRS is more likely to show up!
And the idea that the lottery would somehow allow you to launder money shows you don't really understand how that works. Money laundering is used to invent a paper trail for money you already have, to justify your possession of that money. You cannot fake a lottery-winning paper trail.
And, because most people are morons and get a lump sum, it's taxed even more.
People who are good at math know that it's much better, for tax purposes, to get one million a year over ten years, instead of ten million in one year. And it's even worse, because the lump sum for that would be more like eight million.
But something like 80% of the winner go for the lump sum, and get like 20% less, and pay like 10% more in taxes. All so they can have a giant bank balance immediately.
But, if they're good at math, they normally aren't playing the lottery, I guess.
You're using the same word in different ways. 'identify' can mean 'reference' or it can be mean 'authenticate'.
Your social security is, indeed, used to identify you. As in, it is as a reference, instead of a name, which is not unique. It is a unique 'identifier', that is the entire purpose of it. It is an identifier in the same way that a GPS coordinate is.
What is printed on your social security card is using the word 'identify' to mean 'authentication'. Knowledge of a social security number does not demonstrate that you are you, anymore than knowledge of a property's GPS coordinates does not demonstrate you are the owner.
There is nothing wrong with using social security numbers to reference people. There is everything wrong to use them as authentication, and it's even stupider when they are commonly used as reference. (So that anyone who has a reference to you can pose as you.)
A lot of people sit around an bitch how we have to use our SS numbers for everything, blah blah blah. This is, frankly, fucking stupid. The problem isn't that we use them for that, the problem is that various people allow them to be used to authenticate 'us', and because of shitty consumer protection laws in this country, those people are then allowed to harass us.
We don't even need to change any laws about social security numbers at all. What we need to do is simply have the burden of proof that we did something on these companies.
'identity theft' is nonsense. If I am the 'victim of that, no one stole anyone from me. A third party defrauded another third party using my name, and that third party has decided to harass me about it.
Give me some laws that let me cheaply and easily sue that third party for fucking slander and wasting my time, and we might see some changes in the system, as places actually start using actual authentication, instead of something that's not supposed to be used for authentication.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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Debt Deal Reached
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Are you saying that in other countries they decide what kinds of bonds to issue (long term, medium term, short term) when they authorize the spending?
What sort of bonds are issued is not in the hands of the legislature anymore. They have already passed that responsibility off to the Treasury. They could specify that, but they do not.
Other countries are the same way. No legislature is currently going around deciding what bonds to issue.
This entire debate about the 'debt ceiling' is literally about changing one number in the law. It is not about 'deciding to issue' bonds...it is about giving the authority to the people who do decide to issue bonds to issue a total amount that exceeds the current law.
An understanding of 18th Century usage indicates that the framers of the Constitution intended for the Congress to authorize each and every individual bond issuance by the U.S. government.
Yes, because the best way to decide what interest rates and how to break up sales of bonds is to do it via the legislature which is months behind the market, instead of having a government agency continually attempting to sell bonds at whatever the max rate is that the market will pay.
And, no, your interpretation is stupid.
Congress has the power to 'To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;'. It doesn't say a damn thing about 'authorizing each individual bond issuance', or whatever you think it says. It can borrow money on the credit of the US, period. It can issue individual bonds one at a time, it issue a bunch of bonds at once, it can get a damn American Express and buy things with that if it wants. There are no rules about how it can borrow money on the credit of the US.
Congress, as it does with every instance of its authority, has tasked a government agency (The Treasury) to borrow money on the credit of the United States, just like it set up a agency to do naturalization and one to regulate standards of weights and measures. That's how the government works.
The problem is, in this case, the Treasury has a random arbitrary cap on the bonds it can issue, instead of it just being limited to 'the amount of money needed to operate the budget Congress passed'.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 4, Informative
And the third, sane way is for Congress to authorize borrowing the money to spend at the same time they authorize spending the money.
That's what other people mean when they say other countries don't have a 'debt ceiling'. In other countries, just like the US, the legislature is required to authorized all spending and all borrowing. The legislative branch always creates the budget, and the ability to borrow. There is no government where the chief executive can decide to randomly spend money, and no government when he can randomly borrow money to do so.
However, in other countries, they just do those two things at the same fucking time. As they pass a budget, they authorize the borrowing of money to cover that budget, and hence do not have idiotic votes like this one.
We, however, have insanely decided to pass impossible bills, where we say we are going to spend $X on something, without the ability to do so...and then come along later to make say 'And we we can borrow the money when we need it', making our budget actually possible. No other country is this goddamn stupid.
Hey, moron. Everything Congress passes (and the president signs) is a law. Including the budget.
The president is, in fact, legally required to spend as the amount of money allocated in the budget on things it says to spend money. Because he has a law directing him to do so. (Granted this law has no punishment for breaking it, but that's just as well as the president can't be charged with a crime while in office anyway. However, failure to spend money that way is certainly grounds for impeachment.)
Now, Congress is failing to specify any way for him to to get that money to spend, but that does not mean he is not legally mandated to spend money on what he was ordered to spend money on.
Hell, legally, he could probably have the US take out a payday loan from the check-cashing place down the street. In the absence of any actual directions how he's supposed to get the money he's legally required to spend, I think a plausible case could be that he's allowed to do anything that is not outright illegal to get that money, even if it's not standard policy of the US.
If you budget more money that you actually have, you can't just take out a loan to meet the budget; you have to spend less than you budgeted.
Also, you're an idiot who doesn't know what a 'budget' is. You can, indeed, make a budget that includes 'getting a loan' in it, you imbecile. Businesses do it all the time
Likewise, you can go over budget, and yet not need a loan. In fact, most people go over budget, because standard practice when budgeting is to leave slack. People might make $1000 a month, budget $900, and spend $940. They are 'over budget', but not enough to be in the red.
You have apparently confused 'budget' and 'how much money someone currently has'.
A budget has no bearing on the amount of money you actually have. A budget is a specific list of how you intend to spend money. This normally is 'money you have', but does not need to be.
This money you intend to spend can include loans, it can include future income, it can even include money you don't have and have no way of getting. It's a budget, not a bank account.
Here's a good rule of thumb. It will take 4-5 people who earn the same income that you do to pay for your SS benefits when you retire. Or look at is as total incomes worth about 4-5 times what you earn. Raising the limit isn't going to help since that limit also determines how much that person will receive in retirement benefits.
I always wonder about the people who repeat that 4-5 like it means something.
You people make it sound like it takes four people working their entire life to support someone else in retirement. Well, yeah, if that person lives 160 years after retirement, I guess. Moreover, in your insane universe, social security would only be solvent if the population quadrupled every 40 years! Yeah, it doesn't. It's never done that. It only tripled in the last century!
No, how it actually works is that for every decade someone spends on social security, four people have to spend a decade paying into it...or, to rearrange things a little, one person has to spend four decades paying into it. I.e., if someone works from 27-67, they personally have paid enough to get social security until they are 77. (Erm, pretending it actually worked like that and they paid for their own income.)
In the actual word, generally, as long as more people die before 77 than die after, social security is balanced with no population growth. (That is, of course, a huge oversimplification.) Of course, life expectancy is slightly higher than that, and people often don't work the full 40 years. But, OTOH, there actually is population growth.
Then perhaps the goddamn Republicans should have worried about spending money when they passed the actual budget.
Instead of now, when we're following the budget they passed and, as everyone knew we would, need to borrow to keep spending the money they said we should.
Oh, wait, I forgot, they were too worried about extending the tax cuts when passing the budget to worry about spending.
Personally I believe the president should issue an executive order raising the arbitrary debt ceiling. Section 4 of the 14th amendment requires such drastic action since it states that "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." In other words, the republicans already authorized this year's debt when they passed the fiscal budget, and they are violating the constitution by refusing to make sure we have enough funds (from both taxes and credit) to meet those obligations.
I think the president is eventually going to do that if they do nothing. In fact, I suspect he had Bill Clinton float that idea on purpose, to make sure people were paying attention to the fact he could.
But only after either the Republicans have proven themselves total idiots who couldn't accept the deal that was exactly what they demanded, or they will accept the deal, and the Tea Party will murder them in primaries because the Tea Party is a bunch of wackjobs.
Seems a bit harsh, but the Republicans elected people who have proven to be in the class of people called 'dangerous idiots', and we need them out of office as fast as fucking possible. They're the sort of people who, when they do not like when the bus is going, attempt to fight the bus driver over control of the steering wheel.
It's probably worth mentioning that the President could probably do this even without the 14th amendment. The president has been handed two conflicting laws. He's legally required to spend money, and he's not legally allowed to borrow the money he needs to spend. In those circumstances, he can probably say 'fuck this' and go with the most recent law, aka, the budget.
Look, just stop it. We know it would be possible to do 'electronic voting' correctly by just using computers to print finished ballots. We're not idiots, and probably 90% of us want to see that happen.
We also know that everyone standing up and saying so is just unwittingly supporting the existing system.
Every time you say 'Electronic voting can be made secure', the masses also hear e-voting companies say 'And our system is one of those', even though it's not.
Of course, what you are talking about is not electronic voting. It's just computer-assisted ballot filling.
So just...Shut. The. Fuck. Up.. Sorry to be so blunt, but you're hurting things. You are making them worse with your suggestion, even if it's a perfectly good one.
Remain quiet until we actually finish explaining how insanely dangerous and tamperable electronic records are. Until people have gotten it through their heads that computers do whatever people tell them to do, including lie.
At that point, after we've fixed this insane undemocratic bullshit and made people understand that manipulating paper is the only way to have safe elections, then you step forward and say 'But surely we could print on the paper ballots with computers? I mean, the computers could hardly tamper with it after it's on paper.' and everyone will nod and you can even pretend you thought of it yourself.
I agree, but actually voting by paper ballots does involve a black box. The ballot box.
But it's a black box we can understand. It's a box we can see is empty before the vote starts, it's a box we can see each and every person walk up, it's a box we can see emptied at the end and look at the votes.
All the box does is scramble the relationship between the votes and the people putting them in. It cannot add votes, it cannot alter them, it cannot removed them.
You know, unlike a computer can.
And, yes, there certainly are 'attacks' that can be made against ballot boxes. Most of which involved subverting an entire precinct from top to bottom, and most of which have been rendered impossible at this point anyway, or could trivially be rendered impossible.
For example, we have very cheap cameras now, why not record the movement of ballot boxes? Hell, put a camera on the box itself, complete with real-time streaming and GPS tracking.
We can either use physical ballots, and make rigging an election require an Ocean's-11-type heist with split second time and misdirection, and just like banks we can make it more secure over over time...or we can use electronic voting, and make rigging an election required running exactly one line of code on a computer.
Because technology can not be observed. I do not understand why this is not obvious to people.
There is a secret vote. People must not be able to see the votes after they are made.
Meanwhile, the system must be set up where votes cannot be added or removed in secret. (It means jack-shit if you can prove your vote was in there if you can't prove if the other votes were or not.)
You could do one or the other with a computer. You could have a computer that does the first, easily. You could have a computer that does the second, easily.
You cannot have a computer that does both. No, I don't care what sort of stupid mathematical tricks you get up to...you can perhaps verify that your vote is in there, but you can't verify that votes were not added by some piece of software somewhere. (And now you've added vote buying if you let people see their vote, and you've rendered the system useless if you don't...it's pointless to prove the vote is 'there' if you cannot actually look at it add to the vote totals.)
This is because computers will do whatever you tell them to, and barring decades worth of time with electron microscopes, no one can ever prove what that is.
Luckily, we appear to operate in a universe with actual laws of physics, and one of those rules is 'no teleporting'. So, if instead of putting the votes in a computer, where they can magically be added to or removed, we can put the votes in a big box that we make sure is empty to start with, and then watch the box.
It's not fucking rocket science. If we ever come out with teleporters, or with nanotech that can run around changing the print on ballots, we'll have to reevaluate the process, but until then, using the actual laws of physics seems much saner than pretending we can keep track of everything that might happen in a computer.
Well, I have to disagree that's the danger. I think the fact that someone can rig them is more important than the fact people might think people can rig them.
But you are correct, people have already lost so much faith in the political process, and voting machines seems purposefully designed to make them lose more.
The danger isn't that people will have conspiracy theories, the danger is that people will continue to simply vote less and less, as a sort of general dissatisfaction with the entire system. Conspiracy theories about the vote will be part of that.
Electronic voting machines are one of those things there's literally no justifiable reason for, at all. They cost more, they are more work, they serve no purpose at all. No one can explain them.
They're much like people making the 'prove your ID' laws harsher to vote. This county has literally no instances of people voting under fake IDs in the last few decades and no instances of people in this country illegally voting. (Voter fraud exist,yes, usually by people deliberately attempting to vote in the wrong precinct under their actual names.) If the media would actually do their job and point this out, we might get somewhere.
He was using 'tax exempt' as a shorthand for donations to it are tax exempt.
There are various types of non-profits that exist in various ways. 501(c)(3) is 'charitable' organizations. To be a 'charity', which means people can donate money to it and those donations be tax deductible, it cannot endorse a political candidate. It must serve the public good, or at least not do various things that the government explicitly excludes from 'the public good' list, and promoting individual candidates or legislation is the most obvious exclusion. (And the other most obvious one is that it must be organized to help society at large, or at least some subset of society, and not just members.)
Other non-profits, generally under the 501(c) area of code, do not have to, for example, pay income tax, but people cannot deduct donations to them from their taxes. For example, the Freemasons are a 501(c)(10). You cannot deduct the dues to the Freemasons from your taxes.
Almost all churches attempt to fall under the 501(c)(3) 'charity' banner. If they endorse candidates, they risk losing their 'charity' status, which means people cannot get a tax deduction from donations to them.
The law's over here. Although the 'you can deduct the donation from your taxes to a 501(c)(3)' rule is somewhere over under the personal income tax code.
Yes, and the second IMAP supports this standard you've invented, feel free to pester the Android people to implement it.
This article, however, is retarded. Of course the password is stored on the device. It couldn't access email if it wasn't.
As some people said, they could make it slightly better by encrypting the filesystem or the file, and requiring people to enter a password to decrypt it on startup. Although considering that telephone 'passwords' tend to be only 10000 different combinations, uh, those are trivially easy to crack with brute force.
But that's not anything close to what the article suggests, because the article was written by an idiot who thinks you can log into places with hashes of password instead of the actual password. (Which would, of course, defeat the entire point of using hashes in the first place.)
Ah, yes, and now 'all Democrats' have turned into the 'crazy leftwing', which, for reference to all the non-idiots out there, is what we're actually talking about.
Because there are a few crazy people in San Francisco, that means the crazy leftwing has a much power as, for example, Michele Bachmann.
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Erm, I wasn't talking about the Ultimate universe. I have no problem with anything going on over there.
I'm talking about the normal Marvel universe, where they magically erased Spider-Man's marriage to Mary Jane. (A marriage, which should be noted, fans had no problems with for two decades.)
And, frankly, the existence of Ultimate Spider-Man makes this even more absurd. If people wanted to read single, young Spider-Man, they know where to get him!
At the same time, they also erased public knowledge of his identity. That I don't have a problem with, that was necessary to actually continue the story. As much as they like to tease unmaskings, we know they can't really do it, and no one minds changing stuff that was that recent. Although if they were going to replace Peter, that also would be a great in-story reason to do it.
And they also brought back Harry Osbourne, which is, meh. You expect people to come back from the dead in comics, and changing history so he's 'really' been around the entire time, instead of just resurrecting him...whatever.
Erasing two decades of married continuity, though, is utter bullshit.
I think a of the posters replying to me took my numbers a bit too seriously. 20% less was actually a very conservative estimate. In my state, lump sum people take about 40% less.
Making that up would require something like a 5% interest rate. Which I guess you can get...but you can hardly get better. (As someone pointed out, it's entirely possible that this is the state investing it for you.)
Plus you've got the tax problem on top of that, although that varies based on exactly how much you won. Something like $15 million, it's going to make a large difference. The tax difference between $500 thousand a year for 30 years and $8 million all at once...the later is going to taxed at essentially 35%, whereas the former is closer to 30%.
Something like $100 million, no, the taxes really don't differ either way.
Although with an annuity, you at least have the time and ability to set up charitable donations and reduce your tax load somewhat each year.
Then again there's the question of whether you could borrow against the future income from the the periodic payments, but this strikes me as unlikely to be workable; quick googling suggests that an income stream from lottery winnings are typically not transferable or even inheritable, which suggests to me that you won't be able to take a secured loan against it.
There are plenty of people offering absurd loans to lottery winners. And ready to sue for their money back.
Whether or not there are any actual ethical people doing so, I don't know.
Uh, yea, the taxes would be beat by inflation.
However, all of that's moot when you realize the lump sum winners get a lot less payout.
In my state, Georgia, we had a draw a while back that was $355 million...or $205 million, lump sum.
That's almost cut in half!
Without hitting the Google search the other respondent has linked, money laundering via lottery would be a case of buying a lot of tickets, then when challenged regarding your income point at all the winning tickets.
All instances of people using the lottery for money laundering are when criminal track down and purchase (at slightly above face value) winning tickets from the winners. Showing a winning lottery ticket to the IRS does make the audit go away. (Of course, those poor saps who sold their ticket are now in trouble trying to explain where their money came from.)
No one purchases lottery tickets at a store to launder money at all. This is because the IRS simply will not fold when you wave losing lottery tickets at it, and claim you had others that won a lot. They will laugh at you. I love how people here seem to think the IRS is a bunch of morons, or that they have to accept whatever strange story people have invented to justify their money.
And it seems a very strange idea that you'd need some losing tickets to justify it, anyway. Who the fuck keeps losing lottery tickets? Or what if you bought ten lottery tickets and won $1000 on each of them, so you didn't have any 'losing' tickets? Seriously, this entire premise is idiotic.
Money laundering is used to create paper trails of where money comes from. A few losing lottery tickets is not a paper trail of where the money came from...it certainly didn't come from any losing tickets at all!
You realize that none of those results are about anyone actually doing it, right?
A few are about someone hypothetically doing what was spoke of, which is rightly shot down on exactly the grounds I said.
A few more are about schemes that have criminals use actual lottery winners to launder money. They buy winning tickets from lottery winners, so now the lottery winner has to explain where the money came from, instead of them.
There are no examples of people purchasing tickets with the intent of pointing at losing tickets to explain their winnings.
The fact that a google search returns results does not actually mean people do what you have searched for.
...is they essentially undid all of Peter's character development, erased his marriage, made him back to a 'single nerdy guy'...and then killed him off and replaced him.
Hey, idiots? Why not just, I dunno, injure him, or remove his powers, or something, and let him retire in peace with his wife? And then have a new guy take over?
Yes, yes I'm aware Peter will probably be back from the dead, and take back up his position, but, seriously. Either you keep the character as he's changed and grown over the years, or you should just let him walk off into the sunset and bring in some new young single person for people to relate to. You don't rewrite his life and then kill him off and then bring in someone new.
What are you talking about? Why not just declare your income?
The idea that somehow need to 'prove' your income is nonsense.
The IRS cares when your stated income does not match what you own. If you care whether or not the IRS cares, all you have to do is declare the income.
Or are you under the impression you can't declare illegal income? Yes, you really can. You can even put 'Criminal activities' right there on your tax form, if you want, although most criminals would come up with something else. (Like 'handyman' or 'escort'.)
Not lottery winnings, though, that's insane. In fact, if you start reporting large lottery wins, the IRS is more likely to show up!
And the idea that the lottery would somehow allow you to launder money shows you don't really understand how that works. Money laundering is used to invent a paper trail for money you already have, to justify your possession of that money. You cannot fake a lottery-winning paper trail.
Actually, they don't get you coming, at least not here in Georgia. Lottery tickets have no sales tax.
And, because most people are morons and get a lump sum, it's taxed even more.
People who are good at math know that it's much better, for tax purposes, to get one million a year over ten years, instead of ten million in one year. And it's even worse, because the lump sum for that would be more like eight million.
But something like 80% of the winner go for the lump sum, and get like 20% less, and pay like 10% more in taxes. All so they can have a giant bank balance immediately.
But, if they're good at math, they normally aren't playing the lottery, I guess.
You're using the same word in different ways. 'identify' can mean 'reference' or it can be mean 'authenticate'.
Your social security is, indeed, used to identify you. As in, it is as a reference, instead of a name, which is not unique. It is a unique 'identifier', that is the entire purpose of it. It is an identifier in the same way that a GPS coordinate is.
What is printed on your social security card is using the word 'identify' to mean 'authentication'. Knowledge of a social security number does not demonstrate that you are you, anymore than knowledge of a property's GPS coordinates does not demonstrate you are the owner.
There is nothing wrong with using social security numbers to reference people. There is everything wrong to use them as authentication, and it's even stupider when they are commonly used as reference. (So that anyone who has a reference to you can pose as you.)
A lot of people sit around an bitch how we have to use our SS numbers for everything, blah blah blah. This is, frankly, fucking stupid. The problem isn't that we use them for that, the problem is that various people allow them to be used to authenticate 'us', and because of shitty consumer protection laws in this country, those people are then allowed to harass us.
We don't even need to change any laws about social security numbers at all. What we need to do is simply have the burden of proof that we did something on these companies.
'identity theft' is nonsense. If I am the 'victim of that, no one stole anyone from me. A third party defrauded another third party using my name, and that third party has decided to harass me about it.
Give me some laws that let me cheaply and easily sue that third party for fucking slander and wasting my time, and we might see some changes in the system, as places actually start using actual authentication, instead of something that's not supposed to be used for authentication.
Are you saying that in other countries they decide what kinds of bonds to issue (long term, medium term, short term) when they authorize the spending?
What sort of bonds are issued is not in the hands of the legislature anymore. They have already passed that responsibility off to the Treasury. They could specify that, but they do not.
Other countries are the same way. No legislature is currently going around deciding what bonds to issue.
This entire debate about the 'debt ceiling' is literally about changing one number in the law. It is not about 'deciding to issue' bonds...it is about giving the authority to the people who do decide to issue bonds to issue a total amount that exceeds the current law.
An understanding of 18th Century usage indicates that the framers of the Constitution intended for the Congress to authorize each and every individual bond issuance by the U.S. government.
Yes, because the best way to decide what interest rates and how to break up sales of bonds is to do it via the legislature which is months behind the market, instead of having a government agency continually attempting to sell bonds at whatever the max rate is that the market will pay.
And, no, your interpretation is stupid.
Congress has the power to 'To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;'. It doesn't say a damn thing about 'authorizing each individual bond issuance', or whatever you think it says. It can borrow money on the credit of the US, period. It can issue individual bonds one at a time, it issue a bunch of bonds at once, it can get a damn American Express and buy things with that if it wants. There are no rules about how it can borrow money on the credit of the US.
Congress, as it does with every instance of its authority, has tasked a government agency (The Treasury) to borrow money on the credit of the United States, just like it set up a agency to do naturalization and one to regulate standards of weights and measures. That's how the government works.
The problem is, in this case, the Treasury has a random arbitrary cap on the bonds it can issue, instead of it just being limited to 'the amount of money needed to operate the budget Congress passed'.
And the third, sane way is for Congress to authorize borrowing the money to spend at the same time they authorize spending the money.
That's what other people mean when they say other countries don't have a 'debt ceiling'. In other countries, just like the US, the legislature is required to authorized all spending and all borrowing. The legislative branch always creates the budget, and the ability to borrow. There is no government where the chief executive can decide to randomly spend money, and no government when he can randomly borrow money to do so.
However, in other countries, they just do those two things at the same fucking time. As they pass a budget, they authorize the borrowing of money to cover that budget, and hence do not have idiotic votes like this one.
We, however, have insanely decided to pass impossible bills, where we say we are going to spend $X on something, without the ability to do so...and then come along later to make say 'And we we can borrow the money when we need it', making our budget actually possible. No other country is this goddamn stupid.
Hey, moron. Everything Congress passes (and the president signs) is a law. Including the budget.
The president is, in fact, legally required to spend as the amount of money allocated in the budget on things it says to spend money. Because he has a law directing him to do so. (Granted this law has no punishment for breaking it, but that's just as well as the president can't be charged with a crime while in office anyway. However, failure to spend money that way is certainly grounds for impeachment.)
Now, Congress is failing to specify any way for him to to get that money to spend, but that does not mean he is not legally mandated to spend money on what he was ordered to spend money on.
Hell, legally, he could probably have the US take out a payday loan from the check-cashing place down the street. In the absence of any actual directions how he's supposed to get the money he's legally required to spend, I think a plausible case could be that he's allowed to do anything that is not outright illegal to get that money, even if it's not standard policy of the US.
If you budget more money that you actually have, you can't just take out a loan to meet the budget; you have to spend less than you budgeted.
Also, you're an idiot who doesn't know what a 'budget' is. You can, indeed, make a budget that includes 'getting a loan' in it, you imbecile. Businesses do it all the time
Likewise, you can go over budget, and yet not need a loan. In fact, most people go over budget, because standard practice when budgeting is to leave slack. People might make $1000 a month, budget $900, and spend $940. They are 'over budget', but not enough to be in the red.
You have apparently confused 'budget' and 'how much money someone currently has'.
A budget has no bearing on the amount of money you actually have. A budget is a specific list of how you intend to spend money. This normally is 'money you have', but does not need to be.
This money you intend to spend can include loans, it can include future income, it can even include money you don't have and have no way of getting. It's a budget, not a bank account.
Here's a good rule of thumb. It will take 4-5 people who earn the same income that you do to pay for your SS benefits when you retire. Or look at is as total incomes worth about 4-5 times what you earn. Raising the limit isn't going to help since that limit also determines how much that person will receive in retirement benefits.
I always wonder about the people who repeat that 4-5 like it means something.
You people make it sound like it takes four people working their entire life to support someone else in retirement. Well, yeah, if that person lives 160 years after retirement, I guess. Moreover, in your insane universe, social security would only be solvent if the population quadrupled every 40 years! Yeah, it doesn't. It's never done that. It only tripled in the last century!
No, how it actually works is that for every decade someone spends on social security, four people have to spend a decade paying into it...or, to rearrange things a little, one person has to spend four decades paying into it. I.e., if someone works from 27-67, they personally have paid enough to get social security until they are 77. (Erm, pretending it actually worked like that and they paid for their own income.)
In the actual word, generally, as long as more people die before 77 than die after, social security is balanced with no population growth. (That is, of course, a huge oversimplification.) Of course, life expectancy is slightly higher than that, and people often don't work the full 40 years. But, OTOH, there actually is population growth.
Then perhaps the goddamn Republicans should have worried about spending money when they passed the actual budget.
Instead of now, when we're following the budget they passed and, as everyone knew we would, need to borrow to keep spending the money they said we should.
Oh, wait, I forgot, they were too worried about extending the tax cuts when passing the budget to worry about spending.
Personally I believe the president should issue an executive order raising the arbitrary debt ceiling. Section 4 of the 14th amendment requires such drastic action since it states that "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." In other words, the republicans already authorized this year's debt when they passed the fiscal budget, and they are violating the constitution by refusing to make sure we have enough funds (from both taxes and credit) to meet those obligations.
I think the president is eventually going to do that if they do nothing. In fact, I suspect he had Bill Clinton float that idea on purpose, to make sure people were paying attention to the fact he could.
But only after either the Republicans have proven themselves total idiots who couldn't accept the deal that was exactly what they demanded, or they will accept the deal, and the Tea Party will murder them in primaries because the Tea Party is a bunch of wackjobs.
Seems a bit harsh, but the Republicans elected people who have proven to be in the class of people called 'dangerous idiots', and we need them out of office as fast as fucking possible. They're the sort of people who, when they do not like when the bus is going, attempt to fight the bus driver over control of the steering wheel.
It's probably worth mentioning that the President could probably do this even without the 14th amendment. The president has been handed two conflicting laws. He's legally required to spend money, and he's not legally allowed to borrow the money he needs to spend. In those circumstances, he can probably say 'fuck this' and go with the most recent law, aka, the budget.
*SLAP*
Look, just stop it. We know it would be possible to do 'electronic voting' correctly by just using computers to print finished ballots. We're not idiots, and probably 90% of us want to see that happen.
We also know that everyone standing up and saying so is just unwittingly supporting the existing system.
Every time you say 'Electronic voting can be made secure', the masses also hear e-voting companies say 'And our system is one of those', even though it's not.
Of course, what you are talking about is not electronic voting. It's just computer-assisted ballot filling.
So just...Shut. The. Fuck. Up.. Sorry to be so blunt, but you're hurting things. You are making them worse with your suggestion, even if it's a perfectly good one.
Remain quiet until we actually finish explaining how insanely dangerous and tamperable electronic records are. Until people have gotten it through their heads that computers do whatever people tell them to do, including lie.
At that point, after we've fixed this insane undemocratic bullshit and made people understand that manipulating paper is the only way to have safe elections, then you step forward and say 'But surely we could print on the paper ballots with computers? I mean, the computers could hardly tamper with it after it's on paper.' and everyone will nod and you can even pretend you thought of it yourself.
I agree, but actually voting by paper ballots does involve a black box. The ballot box.
But it's a black box we can understand. It's a box we can see is empty before the vote starts, it's a box we can see each and every person walk up, it's a box we can see emptied at the end and look at the votes.
All the box does is scramble the relationship between the votes and the people putting them in. It cannot add votes, it cannot alter them, it cannot removed them.
You know, unlike a computer can.
And, yes, there certainly are 'attacks' that can be made against ballot boxes. Most of which involved subverting an entire precinct from top to bottom, and most of which have been rendered impossible at this point anyway, or could trivially be rendered impossible.
For example, we have very cheap cameras now, why not record the movement of ballot boxes? Hell, put a camera on the box itself, complete with real-time streaming and GPS tracking.
We can either use physical ballots, and make rigging an election require an Ocean's-11-type heist with split second time and misdirection, and just like banks we can make it more secure over over time...or we can use electronic voting, and make rigging an election required running exactly one line of code on a computer.
Because technology can not be observed. I do not understand why this is not obvious to people.
There is a secret vote. People must not be able to see the votes after they are made.
Meanwhile, the system must be set up where votes cannot be added or removed in secret. (It means jack-shit if you can prove your vote was in there if you can't prove if the other votes were or not.)
You could do one or the other with a computer. You could have a computer that does the first, easily. You could have a computer that does the second, easily.
You cannot have a computer that does both. No, I don't care what sort of stupid mathematical tricks you get up to...you can perhaps verify that your vote is in there, but you can't verify that votes were not added by some piece of software somewhere. (And now you've added vote buying if you let people see their vote, and you've rendered the system useless if you don't...it's pointless to prove the vote is 'there' if you cannot actually look at it add to the vote totals.)
This is because computers will do whatever you tell them to, and barring decades worth of time with electron microscopes, no one can ever prove what that is.
Luckily, we appear to operate in a universe with actual laws of physics, and one of those rules is 'no teleporting'. So, if instead of putting the votes in a computer, where they can magically be added to or removed, we can put the votes in a big box that we make sure is empty to start with, and then watch the box.
It's not fucking rocket science. If we ever come out with teleporters, or with nanotech that can run around changing the print on ballots, we'll have to reevaluate the process, but until then, using the actual laws of physics seems much saner than pretending we can keep track of everything that might happen in a computer.
Well, I have to disagree that's the danger. I think the fact that someone can rig them is more important than the fact people might think people can rig them.
But you are correct, people have already lost so much faith in the political process, and voting machines seems purposefully designed to make them lose more.
The danger isn't that people will have conspiracy theories, the danger is that people will continue to simply vote less and less, as a sort of general dissatisfaction with the entire system. Conspiracy theories about the vote will be part of that.
Electronic voting machines are one of those things there's literally no justifiable reason for, at all. They cost more, they are more work, they serve no purpose at all. No one can explain them.
They're much like people making the 'prove your ID' laws harsher to vote. This county has literally no instances of people voting under fake IDs in the last few decades and no instances of people in this country illegally voting. (Voter fraud exist,yes, usually by people deliberately attempting to vote in the wrong precinct under their actual names.) If the media would actually do their job and point this out, we might get somewhere.
Erm, yes, up to five years in jail stops 'legitimate owners' from doing it.
It really doesn't stop people who stolen a phone.
He was using 'tax exempt' as a shorthand for donations to it are tax exempt.
There are various types of non-profits that exist in various ways. 501(c)(3) is 'charitable' organizations. To be a 'charity', which means people can donate money to it and those donations be tax deductible, it cannot endorse a political candidate. It must serve the public good, or at least not do various things that the government explicitly excludes from 'the public good' list, and promoting individual candidates or legislation is the most obvious exclusion. (And the other most obvious one is that it must be organized to help society at large, or at least some subset of society, and not just members.)
Other non-profits, generally under the 501(c) area of code, do not have to, for example, pay income tax, but people cannot deduct donations to them from their taxes. For example, the Freemasons are a 501(c)(10). You cannot deduct the dues to the Freemasons from your taxes.
Almost all churches attempt to fall under the 501(c)(3) 'charity' banner. If they endorse candidates, they risk losing their 'charity' status, which means people cannot get a tax deduction from donations to them.
The law's over here. Although the 'you can deduct the donation from your taxes to a 501(c)(3)' rule is somewhere over under the personal income tax code.
Yes, and the second IMAP supports this standard you've invented, feel free to pester the Android people to implement it.
This article, however, is retarded. Of course the password is stored on the device. It couldn't access email if it wasn't.
As some people said, they could make it slightly better by encrypting the filesystem or the file, and requiring people to enter a password to decrypt it on startup. Although considering that telephone 'passwords' tend to be only 10000 different combinations, uh, those are trivially easy to crack with brute force.
But that's not anything close to what the article suggests, because the article was written by an idiot who thinks you can log into places with hashes of password instead of the actual password. (Which would, of course, defeat the entire point of using hashes in the first place.)
Ah, yes, and now 'all Democrats' have turned into the 'crazy leftwing', which, for reference to all the non-idiots out there, is what we're actually talking about.
Because there are a few crazy people in San Francisco, that means the crazy leftwing has a much power as, for example, Michele Bachmann.