There's no comparison between the nomination campaigns and the general election. The primary obligation of the DNC and RNC was to pick good candidate (how successful they were is another question). That does not necessarily mean the most popular candidate. I speak as one whose first Presidential vote was for McGovern in 1972.
The general election is supposed to be impartial, which is an entirely different thing.
My big surprise was finding that Russia thought Slashdot worth sending shills into.
I'm not claiming that all the pro-Russians were shills, but there were several accounts on such subjects as the Russian Anschluss in Crimea or the Russians shooting down an airliner that seemed to be awfully doctrinaire, had a slightly distinctive style, and had even less justification than the typical Slashdot troll.
The three states that Stein picked for recounts have statistical disparities that appear to depend on the type of voting machine in use She wanted those investigated. Minnesota does not use machines that don't leave a paper trail. (I don't know about New Hampshire.)
Stein claimed (I haven't verified) that Michigan was still in doubt when she announced her intention to seek recounts there.
The donation page was very straightforward about what the donations were to be used for. She explained why she was going to run recounts in as many of those three states as she could, and what would be done with the leftover money. She should do exactly what she said she'd do with the money, and that is push for recounts and use the rest to push for clean elections rather than return it. Anything else would be a breach of faith with her contributors.
Possible uses for the money are to file lawsuits asking for certain practices to be started or stopped, running informational campaigns, and possibly even helping counties replace voting machines that do not keep a paper trail.
Stein said that her campaign would spend the money on recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania if they got enough, and that they'd use the remainder of the contributions towards making elections clean. She promised nothing in the way of results. The donation page was very clear on those things.
Do you have evidence that her campaign is doing anything else with the donated money?
The Stein campaign was complaining bitterly about the cost of asking for the Wisconsin recount, so I'd be surprised if there were significant additional costs there. The costs in Michigan and Pennsylvania were considerably lower, so there are likely indirect costs there. Last I looked, her campaign had not raised about $10.5 million.
Personally, I consider verification of close votes to be worth spending my money on.
The Benghazi scandal is not propaganda - the suppression of the facts around it are the propaganda.
I'm going to pick this out.
A hostile Congress launched several expensive investigations into what happened at Benghazi. They were not disposed to suppress facts against Clinton. They all found no wrongdoing on Clinton's part. This is very good evidence that Clinton is not at fault. Personally, I'd blame the Republican Congress who reduced the budget for embassy and consulate security to much less than Clinton asked for.
You made a lot of assertions that, as far as I can tell, are baseless, but this one is definitely wrong.
Relatively few Americans consider Trump's cabinet choices reasonable, and only some of what Trump says is reasonable. (Wanting the theater to be a safe space for politicians?). The biggest dirty trick of the election was Comey's bringing up Clinton emails near the end of the campaign, and that was anti-Clinton (I don't know if it was really pro-Trump, but definitely anti-Clinton), and that's probably what gave Trump some of the states he carried. There is some statistical evidence that certain voting machines may have been tampered to change votes to Trump, enough to justify investigation. The leaders in voter disenfranchisement have generally been Republican (I'm not saying that all Republicans are in favor of it, or that Trump was, but that when it happens Republicans tend to do it).
This is difficult to answer, since TAOCP is tied in with my early education. I went through all three volumes more than once, although I never solved all the problems. (The third exercise is to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. In my copy, it's listed as difficulty HM50 (HM for Higher Mathematics, 50 was a major large-scale research project on his more or less logarithmic scale), and I've heard it has been demoted to HM47 in later editions.).
A lot of TAOCP is excruciatingly detailed analysis of stuff approximately nobody actually cares about anymore. Some of it is completely inapplicable nowadays, such as exact timings of programs. The half-volume on sorting is primarily concerned with in-memory and tape sorts, for example, and the intricacies of different sorting methods with multiple tapes are of no use today. In the original three volumes, everything was single-threaded, although coroutines were in Volume 1. There are good algorithms books nowadays, and I don't remember any but TAOCP back then.
Most of TAOCP is of little practical use nowadays. Pretty much everything it covers is taken care of in libraries in modern computers (or even in hardware, such as floating-point numbers). There's much that's useful for someone who wants to understand how the libraries do what they do, or even create one. I used Volume 2 as the foundation for my entry into a programming contest to do 32/64-bit multiplication and division efficiently on a Z80 (about the only time I used the dual register banks)..
What I gained from it was partly fundamental education and deep understanding and partly mindset. I can't honestly say what anyone would get out of it, although I'd suggest anyone who's interested in what's underlying what they do read part of it and give it a good shot.
Safe nuclear in the sense of no reactor ever emitting significant amounts of radioactive material doesn't exist. Safe coal, solar, wind, etc., by the same sort of rigid criteria, don't exist either. Overall, in the real world, nuclear has proven very safe for decades. You seem to be arguing that we have to have had more nuclear disasters than we've had.
I can understand the situation, but I really doubt that pre-crime prison sentences for potential terrorism are going to help in the long run. As he was showing indications of intent to harm self and others, mental health treatment is probably more appropriate. I'm not real happy about a prison sentence for thinking about joining a terrorist group, and I doubt it will serve the intended purpose.
Also, I'm not blaming the authorities for the nightclub attack. I'm pointing out that it's a difficult problem.
I shouldn't have said "warranted". The police, or other law enforcement agencies, can start any investigation they like on anyone with no cause whatsoever. They're limited in the things they can do during the course of an investigation,at least theoretically. However, if this is an investigation of individuals, the Fourth doesn't apply because they're not searching the individual's effects. If it's an investigation of the exchange, then it isn't a general warrant.
I'm fine with your "I don't give a tinker's damn whether you use cash or not." I do seem to have misunderstood you, and I apologize and agree with you.
Another thing to do with a carbon tax is to reduce other taxes to keep it revenue-neutral. The tricky part is making sure the poor get enough relief, since income tax cuts don't give them much extra money. In the US, paying everybody's first $X of FICA payroll taxes might work.
The really neat thing about carbon taxes is that they allow the market to adjust to produce less CO2, which is going to be more efficient and effective than top-down directives.
It doesn't matter if you believe in climate change or not. What matters is what actually happens. A meter or less by 2100 seems likely, and someone who's living 2m above sea level has plenty of time to move.
I live something like 180 or 190 meters above sea level, personally.
In the US, cash is legal tender for all debts. That doesn't mean people have to accept it in exchange for stuff, but it does mean that, if you owe money, cash works. There are transactions that involve short-term debt, like restaurant bills, and longer-term. Every two weeks, my employer owes me money, and I'd have no legal recourse if they decided to just hand us cash. I'd be annoyed, personally, but that's not a legal issue.
There's a certain amount of float involved with credit cards, also. I get an average of a month between when I buy something and when I have to pay for it. It gives me some flexibility in my payments.
Legally, you should have reported it. If you've got a fraction of a Bitcoin still, it's still a commodity, not a currency, so you don't need to report anything until you sell or otherwise dispose of it. Practically, the IRS doesn't care.
Your Fourth Amendment rights work, more or less, with your persons, houses, papers, and effects. They don't necessarily apply to information a third party has about you. In this case, Coinbase is a legitimate business, and there are reporting laws that likely come into effect. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know the legal situation, but this is very likely legal.
I doubt it's illegal, but it probably looks suspicious. It's your responsibility to report your taxable income, and the IRS can audit you if they think you're trying to pull a fast one on them.
As soon as you could purchase normal day-to-day goods, it became inevitable.
Yup. If you just buy and sell bitcoins, your dollar transactions show all the income the IRS needs to concern itself with. When you buy them, hold them, and then buy stuff with them, you're getting an opportunity to hide capital gains. Say I buy $500 worth of BTC, it goes up to $600, and I sell for a profit of $100. That's taxable income, although it may be capital gains of some sort. If I buy $500 worth of BTC, it goes up to $600, and I buy a $600 3D printer with it, I've still gotten $100 from my speculation, I still owe taxes on it, but my dollar transactions won't show it, and the IRS needs to know more about my dealings to verify my taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no comparison between the nomination campaigns and the general election. The primary obligation of the DNC and RNC was to pick good candidate (how successful they were is another question). That does not necessarily mean the most popular candidate. I speak as one whose first Presidential vote was for McGovern in 1972.
The general election is supposed to be impartial, which is an entirely different thing.
My big surprise was finding that Russia thought Slashdot worth sending shills into.
I'm not claiming that all the pro-Russians were shills, but there were several accounts on such subjects as the Russian Anschluss in Crimea or the Russians shooting down an airliner that seemed to be awfully doctrinaire, had a slightly distinctive style, and had even less justification than the typical Slashdot troll.
The three states that Stein picked for recounts have statistical disparities that appear to depend on the type of voting machine in use She wanted those investigated. Minnesota does not use machines that don't leave a paper trail. (I don't know about New Hampshire.)
Stein claimed (I haven't verified) that Michigan was still in doubt when she announced her intention to seek recounts there.
The donation page was very straightforward about what the donations were to be used for. She explained why she was going to run recounts in as many of those three states as she could, and what would be done with the leftover money. She should do exactly what she said she'd do with the money, and that is push for recounts and use the rest to push for clean elections rather than return it. Anything else would be a breach of faith with her contributors.
Possible uses for the money are to file lawsuits asking for certain practices to be started or stopped, running informational campaigns, and possibly even helping counties replace voting machines that do not keep a paper trail.
Stein said that her campaign would spend the money on recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania if they got enough, and that they'd use the remainder of the contributions towards making elections clean. She promised nothing in the way of results. The donation page was very clear on those things.
Do you have evidence that her campaign is doing anything else with the donated money?
The Stein campaign was complaining bitterly about the cost of asking for the Wisconsin recount, so I'd be surprised if there were significant additional costs there. The costs in Michigan and Pennsylvania were considerably lower, so there are likely indirect costs there. Last I looked, her campaign had not raised about $10.5 million.
Personally, I consider verification of close votes to be worth spending my money on.
I'm going to pick this out.
A hostile Congress launched several expensive investigations into what happened at Benghazi. They were not disposed to suppress facts against Clinton. They all found no wrongdoing on Clinton's part. This is very good evidence that Clinton is not at fault. Personally, I'd blame the Republican Congress who reduced the budget for embassy and consulate security to much less than Clinton asked for.
You made a lot of assertions that, as far as I can tell, are baseless, but this one is definitely wrong.
Relatively few Americans consider Trump's cabinet choices reasonable, and only some of what Trump says is reasonable. (Wanting the theater to be a safe space for politicians?). The biggest dirty trick of the election was Comey's bringing up Clinton emails near the end of the campaign, and that was anti-Clinton (I don't know if it was really pro-Trump, but definitely anti-Clinton), and that's probably what gave Trump some of the states he carried. There is some statistical evidence that certain voting machines may have been tampered to change votes to Trump, enough to justify investigation. The leaders in voter disenfranchisement have generally been Republican (I'm not saying that all Republicans are in favor of it, or that Trump was, but that when it happens Republicans tend to do it).
This is difficult to answer, since TAOCP is tied in with my early education. I went through all three volumes more than once, although I never solved all the problems. (The third exercise is to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. In my copy, it's listed as difficulty HM50 (HM for Higher Mathematics, 50 was a major large-scale research project on his more or less logarithmic scale), and I've heard it has been demoted to HM47 in later editions.).
A lot of TAOCP is excruciatingly detailed analysis of stuff approximately nobody actually cares about anymore. Some of it is completely inapplicable nowadays, such as exact timings of programs. The half-volume on sorting is primarily concerned with in-memory and tape sorts, for example, and the intricacies of different sorting methods with multiple tapes are of no use today. In the original three volumes, everything was single-threaded, although coroutines were in Volume 1. There are good algorithms books nowadays, and I don't remember any but TAOCP back then.
Most of TAOCP is of little practical use nowadays. Pretty much everything it covers is taken care of in libraries in modern computers (or even in hardware, such as floating-point numbers). There's much that's useful for someone who wants to understand how the libraries do what they do, or even create one. I used Volume 2 as the foundation for my entry into a programming contest to do 32/64-bit multiplication and division efficiently on a Z80 (about the only time I used the dual register banks)..
What I gained from it was partly fundamental education and deep understanding and partly mindset. I can't honestly say what anyone would get out of it, although I'd suggest anyone who's interested in what's underlying what they do read part of it and give it a good shot.
Safe nuclear in the sense of no reactor ever emitting significant amounts of radioactive material doesn't exist. Safe coal, solar, wind, etc., by the same sort of rigid criteria, don't exist either. Overall, in the real world, nuclear has proven very safe for decades. You seem to be arguing that we have to have had more nuclear disasters than we've had.
Thank you. I didn't quite remember that passage.
I can understand the situation, but I really doubt that pre-crime prison sentences for potential terrorism are going to help in the long run. As he was showing indications of intent to harm self and others, mental health treatment is probably more appropriate. I'm not real happy about a prison sentence for thinking about joining a terrorist group, and I doubt it will serve the intended purpose.
Also, I'm not blaming the authorities for the nightclub attack. I'm pointing out that it's a difficult problem.
I shouldn't have said "warranted". The police, or other law enforcement agencies, can start any investigation they like on anyone with no cause whatsoever. They're limited in the things they can do during the course of an investigation,at least theoretically. However, if this is an investigation of individuals, the Fourth doesn't apply because they're not searching the individual's effects. If it's an investigation of the exchange, then it isn't a general warrant.
I'm fine with your "I don't give a tinker's damn whether you use cash or not." I do seem to have misunderstood you, and I apologize and agree with you.
Another thing to do with a carbon tax is to reduce other taxes to keep it revenue-neutral. The tricky part is making sure the poor get enough relief, since income tax cuts don't give them much extra money. In the US, paying everybody's first $X of FICA payroll taxes might work.
The really neat thing about carbon taxes is that they allow the market to adjust to produce less CO2, which is going to be more efficient and effective than top-down directives.
Humans are really good at adapting to change. Lots of the species we rely on for food and clothing and such may not be nearly as adaptable.
It doesn't matter if you believe in climate change or not. What matters is what actually happens. A meter or less by 2100 seems likely, and someone who's living 2m above sea level has plenty of time to move.
I live something like 180 or 190 meters above sea level, personally.
In the US, cash is legal tender for all debts. That doesn't mean people have to accept it in exchange for stuff, but it does mean that, if you owe money, cash works. There are transactions that involve short-term debt, like restaurant bills, and longer-term. Every two weeks, my employer owes me money, and I'd have no legal recourse if they decided to just hand us cash. I'd be annoyed, personally, but that's not a legal issue.
If I don't use cash, it doesn't mean you can't. If I can get along everywhere without cash, it doesn't mean you can't function on a cash basis.
Are you arguing that I should structure my financial dealings to be most convenient to you?
There's a certain amount of float involved with credit cards, also. I get an average of a month between when I buy something and when I have to pay for it. It gives me some flexibility in my payments.
Legally, you should have reported it. If you've got a fraction of a Bitcoin still, it's still a commodity, not a currency, so you don't need to report anything until you sell or otherwise dispose of it. Practically, the IRS doesn't care.
Your Fourth Amendment rights work, more or less, with your persons, houses, papers, and effects. They don't necessarily apply to information a third party has about you. In this case, Coinbase is a legitimate business, and there are reporting laws that likely come into effect. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know the legal situation, but this is very likely legal.
Nope. This is not a presumption of guilt. This is a presumption that investigation is warranted, which is something entirely different.
I doubt it's illegal, but it probably looks suspicious. It's your responsibility to report your taxable income, and the IRS can audit you if they think you're trying to pull a fast one on them.
Yup. If you just buy and sell bitcoins, your dollar transactions show all the income the IRS needs to concern itself with. When you buy them, hold them, and then buy stuff with them, you're getting an opportunity to hide capital gains. Say I buy $500 worth of BTC, it goes up to $600, and I sell for a profit of $100. That's taxable income, although it may be capital gains of some sort. If I buy $500 worth of BTC, it goes up to $600, and I buy a $600 3D printer with it, I've still gotten $100 from my speculation, I still owe taxes on it, but my dollar transactions won't show it, and the IRS needs to know more about my dealings to verify my taxes.