Fair enough. I was misled by "Perhaps you have not yet bought (or inherited) real property". Whatever it was, perhaps stocks, it must have been valuable enough that when you sold it the profits were sufficient to pique IRS attention. Anything like that, where you want to prove cost basis, then it's prudent to keep a receipt, but I imagine other forms of evidence are also sometimes accepted. You're not the first person to be nipped by the tax man for lacking receipts, and it sucks.
1. Some of the events on the calendars of these groups included prayer breakfasts. The IRS asks about religion in order to determine whether the organization is political or religious. If you are a religious organization you don't qualify for PAC exemptions; and if you are a PAC then you don't qualify for religious exemptions. To determine what you are, the IRS asks you questions.
2. Some of the groups claimed to be book clubs. When a group tries to claim tax-free status as a "book club" (in quotes) then the IRS should (and thank goodness in this case did) ask about the books they are reading, to see if they were frauds -- which they were, of course.
Look, I get it, conservatives don't like taxes and don't like the government knowing anything about their finances, so they sure as shit don't like the IRS. I get it. But for better or worse (probably worse) we've decided to have a huge complicated tax code enforced by a bunch of bean counters, so when new groups of people whose political goal is to stop paying taxes ask for various types of tax-exempt statuses, it is appropriate for the bean counters to ask some questions. The alternative is to have no taxation, because everyone would claim their house is a church. Yes, again, I know that's what the conservatives want: zero taxes and churches on ever lot; but today that isn't the rules.
I should go start the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Fuck You I Don't Like Taxes. I imagine you and the rest of the Republicans (and farther-right parties) would gleefully defend my tax-exempt status and join my church. But if you did, we'd still all be tax fraudsters.
So you agree that Congress delegated that authority to the IRS? And you agree that it would have been absurd for Congress to write 70,000 pages of details themselves? And you agree that after those rules were written Congress was satisfied enough not to provide new direction to the IRS for changing the rules?
Okay, then we agree, no need to argue about anything.
"the Portland City Council has approved a franchise agreement with Google"
We Slashdotters are all opposed to franchise agreements, right? Why not just "let them build it" without a "franchise agreement"? No agreement necessary, just build the infrastructure.
1. They asked about religion because religion is relevant to the tax code 2. They asked about book reading because reading books is relevant to the tax code
What else you got? So far, you've only got the IRS following the law.
Bullshit. A bunch of tax-dogding scofflaw asshats demanded an illegal tax haven for their blatantly partisan political operations. The IRS responded appropriately by telling them, fuck you, that's not what the tax law says. Then the crybabies ran off to their anarchist asshat representatives who made it into a political sideshow full of lies and nonsense.
Fuck those asshats. Pay your fucking taxes you goddamned asshats.
You owned real property and didn't have any paperwork for your cost basis? No paperwork at all? Nothing filed with the local county or anything? Wow, yep, that sucks.
The lesson is that we don't live in prehistorical times; we live in the modern world where paperwork is important; so keep important paperwork. In that regard you are right on. If you are dealing with large purchases of real property then, yeah, go ahead and keep your bill of sale, or be prepared to pay taxes on your whole take.
When I sold some real property I did still have the paperwork but I never needed it. My accountant asked me how much I'd paid for it, wrote down that amount, and that was it. Mine was a pretty simple transaction though, not the kind of thing the IRS would sniff at.
Also I once asked a tax accountant how long to keep tax records. She told me, for the IRS, seven years is more than long enough; but I should still keep them forever because of Social Security. If I ever have to prove to SS how much I earned decades ago, tax records are the gold standard for doing that.
A flat tax that phases in at some point isn't flat, it's bifurcated. And I think your idea is a good one that I support but it isn't a flat tax and you can't quorum that idea with the idea of flat taxes.
My suggested revision to your idea is that the one-rate-tax kick in at 10x the poverty line, and the rate would be however high it would need to be to equal today's total taxation.
I don't know if any popular filesystems do so, but there are ways to write data to disk such that flipped bits can be detected and corrected. I remember studying this in comps sci class way back in the Clinton/Bush transition era. So multiple disks and redundancy is one good solution but another is a filesystem that can recover lost bits.
If you need to store 64 bits of data you can imagine laying them out in an 8x8 square. Now, widen the square to 9x9 and write a checksum/evenness bit in the extra column to the right, plus the extra row on the bottom. So, if 8 bits sum to checksum 5, then your evenness bit is a 1 making 5+1 an even number. If the checksum is 4, your evenness bit is a 0.
Now, if one of the bits in the 8x8 square is flipped accidentally, then you can detect it and fix it by looking at your extra row-and-column of evenness data. If one bit in the 8x8 grid gets flipped, then the evenness bits in one row and one column will be wrong, reliably indicating the bad bit.
As a bonus, you have one extra bit in the bottom right corner which can act as a final checksum on the evenness bits. That allows you to detect if your checksums are valid. If only one bit in the whole 9x9 grid is flipped, you should be able to detect it and correct it no matter where it is.
I don't know much about real-world filesystems so I don't know if that is a common procedure or not.
I stopped using Netflix a year or two ago, after they said "We have to raise our prices so that we can offer more shows" immediately followed by removing all the stuff I wanted to watch from their streaming library. At that point it was all cost and no benefit, so I just stopped paying, even though the cost wasn't terribly high.
For $12 a month I'd have to watch, oh, maybe 50 hours of TV to make it "worth it". I probably watch two or three hours per month, so I'd value Netflix at about one dollar per month. If they ever offer a service level around there then I'll re-up.
To those of you watching 50 hours a month, awesome, it's an excellent service.
For a private individual the answer to "if you've done nothing wrong, what do you have to hide?" is "all the shit that people do that is embarrassing but not wrong or illegal, of course".
For police, however, there is no such thing as something that is embarrassing but appropriate police behavior. All police behavior that is embarrassing is wrong, so we don't need to worry about protecting police privacy.
Wow, so she's a powerless monarch? That's even more ridiculous than a powerful monarch! Golly, these European kingdoms keep getting crazier and crazier.
Where do you live? We have that in the USA, too. Over here, Congress declares wars and the President prosecutes them. That separation of power is in our Constitution. Our system has the benefit that we elect the guy who runs the war.
Someone please tell me there's more to it than that.
Okay, I'll tell you that there's more to it than that. You know, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a judge, and I don't have extensive legal experience, but I'm fairly certain that the answer to this question
"how should we know?"
is
With evidence presented to the court.
Again, I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that's how all court proceedings go: two people tell different stories, then they present evidence and make arguments, and then a judge makes a ruling. Registering your trademark would simply make the whole court case easier to decide because the registration would be really good evidence. It would be a mistake to assume, as you did, that without a registration there could not possibly be any way to decide the issue. For instance if you trademarked "CauseBy" today, it would be pretty easy for me to show that I was using CauseBy before today.
Great. Now that you have your IP laws in order, you should probably get around to doing away with your kings and queens. It's been embarrassing to have them for over two hundred years now. While you're at it, drop your official state religions, so you can go from being theocratic monarchies to secular democracies.
But yeah, super great that your trademark laws are so flexible.
"if you want that kind of 'license' for firearms where NO ID is required, and its a honor system then good luck, because that's not what most people are demanding when it comes to firearm licenses and registration."
Awesome, we found common ground. We both support this. Sounds good then, I look forward to your support.
Guns, speech, and cars are all different which is why we treat them differently. They also share similarities which is why they can be compared. It is a mistake to make too much of a metaphor between them because they aren't the same thing.
Yeah. There are licenses for political rallies. So yes, there are licenses for that. Yes.
I don't register my opinions with the government because there isn't a compelling reason for doing that, not because there is a magical Constitutional argument against it. There are compelling reasons to manage guns and driving.
And also voting, by the way -- a fundamental right that we have all sorts of different rules for. Oh, you have to register to vote? LORDY LORDY THE IMPOSITION! TYRANNY! Give me a fucking break.
My comment was about "America before Europeans arrived", and what I meant was America the country, not "The Americas" the pair of continents, so the Inca and the Aztec don't count. My understanding of the pre-colonial American Indians was that they had some things like "cities" but nothing at all on the scale of the Inca or the Aztec; they were largely warring with one another and did not have central authorities. But what the fuck do I know? That could all be wrong. I'm just saying, you could possibly find "free markets" in historical times in areas without government at all.
Like, say, today in Sudan. I bet that's a pretty free market.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough. I was misled by "Perhaps you have not yet bought (or inherited) real property". Whatever it was, perhaps stocks, it must have been valuable enough that when you sold it the profits were sufficient to pique IRS attention. Anything like that, where you want to prove cost basis, then it's prudent to keep a receipt, but I imagine other forms of evidence are also sometimes accepted. You're not the first person to be nipped by the tax man for lacking receipts, and it sucks.
1. Some of the events on the calendars of these groups included prayer breakfasts. The IRS asks about religion in order to determine whether the organization is political or religious. If you are a religious organization you don't qualify for PAC exemptions; and if you are a PAC then you don't qualify for religious exemptions. To determine what you are, the IRS asks you questions.
2. Some of the groups claimed to be book clubs. When a group tries to claim tax-free status as a "book club" (in quotes) then the IRS should (and thank goodness in this case did) ask about the books they are reading, to see if they were frauds -- which they were, of course.
Look, I get it, conservatives don't like taxes and don't like the government knowing anything about their finances, so they sure as shit don't like the IRS. I get it. But for better or worse (probably worse) we've decided to have a huge complicated tax code enforced by a bunch of bean counters, so when new groups of people whose political goal is to stop paying taxes ask for various types of tax-exempt statuses, it is appropriate for the bean counters to ask some questions. The alternative is to have no taxation, because everyone would claim their house is a church. Yes, again, I know that's what the conservatives want: zero taxes and churches on ever lot; but today that isn't the rules.
I should go start the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Fuck You I Don't Like Taxes. I imagine you and the rest of the Republicans (and farther-right parties) would gleefully defend my tax-exempt status and join my church. But if you did, we'd still all be tax fraudsters.
So you agree that Congress delegated that authority to the IRS? And you agree that it would have been absurd for Congress to write 70,000 pages of details themselves? And you agree that after those rules were written Congress was satisfied enough not to provide new direction to the IRS for changing the rules?
Okay, then we agree, no need to argue about anything.
"the Portland City Council has approved a franchise agreement with Google"
We Slashdotters are all opposed to franchise agreements, right? Why not just "let them build it" without a "franchise agreement"? No agreement necessary, just build the infrastructure.
1. They asked about religion because religion is relevant to the tax code
2. They asked about book reading because reading books is relevant to the tax code
What else you got? So far, you've only got the IRS following the law.
Bullshit. A bunch of tax-dogding scofflaw asshats demanded an illegal tax haven for their blatantly partisan political operations. The IRS responded appropriately by telling them, fuck you, that's not what the tax law says. Then the crybabies ran off to their anarchist asshat representatives who made it into a political sideshow full of lies and nonsense.
Fuck those asshats. Pay your fucking taxes you goddamned asshats.
You owned real property and didn't have any paperwork for your cost basis? No paperwork at all? Nothing filed with the local county or anything? Wow, yep, that sucks.
The lesson is that we don't live in prehistorical times; we live in the modern world where paperwork is important; so keep important paperwork. In that regard you are right on. If you are dealing with large purchases of real property then, yeah, go ahead and keep your bill of sale, or be prepared to pay taxes on your whole take.
When I sold some real property I did still have the paperwork but I never needed it. My accountant asked me how much I'd paid for it, wrote down that amount, and that was it. Mine was a pretty simple transaction though, not the kind of thing the IRS would sniff at.
Also I once asked a tax accountant how long to keep tax records. She told me, for the IRS, seven years is more than long enough; but I should still keep them forever because of Social Security. If I ever have to prove to SS how much I earned decades ago, tax records are the gold standard for doing that.
Mmm hmm. Delegated authority. The IRS has it.
The alternative is for Congress to write 70,000 pages of tax rules. Realists consider that a fucking shit-tarded idea.
The other alternative is for rich people to pay even less taxes than they do now because [hand waving] see? no tax liability!
A flat tax that phases in at some point isn't flat, it's bifurcated. And I think your idea is a good one that I support but it isn't a flat tax and you can't quorum that idea with the idea of flat taxes.
My suggested revision to your idea is that the one-rate-tax kick in at 10x the poverty line, and the rate would be however high it would need to be to equal today's total taxation.
I don't know if any popular filesystems do so, but there are ways to write data to disk such that flipped bits can be detected and corrected. I remember studying this in comps sci class way back in the Clinton/Bush transition era. So multiple disks and redundancy is one good solution but another is a filesystem that can recover lost bits.
If you need to store 64 bits of data you can imagine laying them out in an 8x8 square. Now, widen the square to 9x9 and write a checksum/evenness bit in the extra column to the right, plus the extra row on the bottom. So, if 8 bits sum to checksum 5, then your evenness bit is a 1 making 5+1 an even number. If the checksum is 4, your evenness bit is a 0.
Now, if one of the bits in the 8x8 square is flipped accidentally, then you can detect it and fix it by looking at your extra row-and-column of evenness data. If one bit in the 8x8 grid gets flipped, then the evenness bits in one row and one column will be wrong, reliably indicating the bad bit.
As a bonus, you have one extra bit in the bottom right corner which can act as a final checksum on the evenness bits. That allows you to detect if your checksums are valid. If only one bit in the whole 9x9 grid is flipped, you should be able to detect it and correct it no matter where it is.
I don't know much about real-world filesystems so I don't know if that is a common procedure or not.
I stopped using Netflix a year or two ago, after they said "We have to raise our prices so that we can offer more shows" immediately followed by removing all the stuff I wanted to watch from their streaming library. At that point it was all cost and no benefit, so I just stopped paying, even though the cost wasn't terribly high.
For $12 a month I'd have to watch, oh, maybe 50 hours of TV to make it "worth it". I probably watch two or three hours per month, so I'd value Netflix at about one dollar per month. If they ever offer a service level around there then I'll re-up.
To those of you watching 50 hours a month, awesome, it's an excellent service.
The libertarians and the flower people say they don't.
Dear tverbeek,
That's okay, I won't mind so much, because I'll be up here chillin' in heaven, not worried about Brat at all.
Yours truly,
God
"News For Nerds" not "Nerdy News".
Yep. So far I've never seen an ad on Facebook. I don't know if I'd use it if I did, but I might be willing to pay one dollar a month for it.
Agreed.
For a private individual the answer to "if you've done nothing wrong, what do you have to hide?" is "all the shit that people do that is embarrassing but not wrong or illegal, of course".
For police, however, there is no such thing as something that is embarrassing but appropriate police behavior. All police behavior that is embarrassing is wrong, so we don't need to worry about protecting police privacy.
Wow, so she's a powerless monarch? That's even more ridiculous than a powerful monarch! Golly, these European kingdoms keep getting crazier and crazier.
Where do you live? We have that in the USA, too. Over here, Congress declares wars and the President prosecutes them. That separation of power is in our Constitution. Our system has the benefit that we elect the guy who runs the war.
Someone please tell me there's more to it than that.
Okay, I'll tell you that there's more to it than that. You know, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a judge, and I don't have extensive legal experience, but I'm fairly certain that the answer to this question
"how should we know?"
is
With evidence presented to the court.
Again, I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that's how all court proceedings go: two people tell different stories, then they present evidence and make arguments, and then a judge makes a ruling. Registering your trademark would simply make the whole court case easier to decide because the registration would be really good evidence. It would be a mistake to assume, as you did, that without a registration there could not possibly be any way to decide the issue. For instance if you trademarked "CauseBy" today, it would be pretty easy for me to show that I was using CauseBy before today.
Almost all property recognized by courts is not registered with the government. I don't think we'd want it to be otherwise.
You nailed it. The other guy/s are loons.
Great. Now that you have your IP laws in order, you should probably get around to doing away with your kings and queens. It's been embarrassing to have them for over two hundred years now. While you're at it, drop your official state religions, so you can go from being theocratic monarchies to secular democracies.
But yeah, super great that your trademark laws are so flexible.
"if you want that kind of 'license' for firearms where NO ID is required, and its a honor system then good luck, because that's not what most people are demanding when it comes to firearm licenses and registration."
Awesome, we found common ground. We both support this. Sounds good then, I look forward to your support.
Guns, speech, and cars are all different which is why we treat them differently. They also share similarities which is why they can be compared. It is a mistake to make too much of a metaphor between them because they aren't the same thing.
Yeah. There are licenses for political rallies. So yes, there are licenses for that. Yes.
I don't register my opinions with the government because there isn't a compelling reason for doing that, not because there is a magical Constitutional argument against it. There are compelling reasons to manage guns and driving.
And also voting, by the way -- a fundamental right that we have all sorts of different rules for. Oh, you have to register to vote? LORDY LORDY THE IMPOSITION! TYRANNY! Give me a fucking break.
My comment was about "America before Europeans arrived", and what I meant was America the country, not "The Americas" the pair of continents, so the Inca and the Aztec don't count. My understanding of the pre-colonial American Indians was that they had some things like "cities" but nothing at all on the scale of the Inca or the Aztec; they were largely warring with one another and did not have central authorities. But what the fuck do I know? That could all be wrong. I'm just saying, you could possibly find "free markets" in historical times in areas without government at all.
Like, say, today in Sudan. I bet that's a pretty free market.