Ay, dios mio!
Well yesterday was a strange day. It only rained for about 20 minutes. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Hell, the sun actually came out in the afternoon too! So hopefully the storms are passing and we can set the auction yard for tomorrow’s sale and nobody will get sucked through a sinkhole into the bowels of the earth. But if they do, maybe they’ll see the Argentina team bus on the way down. I mean…wow. They got kicked in the taint by Croatia so hard that their chances of advancing into the knockout stages are really, really low. Like winning-the-Falklands War-level unlikely. Elsewhere in the tournament, the Frogs beat Peru and the Socceroos drew with Denmark in what was a rather exciting game. Today brings us Brazil-Costa Rica, Nigeria-Iceland and Serbia-Switzerland. Two of those three should be enjoyable while the first one will probably look like a dramatic reenactment of the Charles Whitman shooting spree with all the flopping that’s been going on from South- and Central American players.
WOOOOO, PIG SOOOOOOEY!
Well we’re down to the Final Four in the College World Series. And yes, those Happy Hogs are alive and kicking squealing. They’ll take on Florida for the right to go to the championship series, needing to win just one game to get there and Florida needing to take a pair of games since they already have a loss. The other pairing puts Oregon State in the position of needing two wins against Mississippi State, who needs just one to reach the final series. The action kicks off with Oregon State-MSU in the afternoon and UF-Arkansas in the evening. Good luck to everyone. But not to the Gators.
The Astros were off. The Brewers won, the Reds beat the Cubs, the Giants won, the D-backs won and Baltimore continues to be inexplicably terrible as they fell to the Nats. And that, my friends, is it for sports today.
Today we celebrate the birthday of gun enthusiast and enemy of bankers John Dillinger, the extraordinary filmmaker Billy Wilder, hospice founder Cicely Saunders, Highwayman Kris Kristofferson, “journalist” Ed Bradley, the pistol Pete Maravich, Polanski fan Meryl Streep, opportunistic scumbag Lizzie Warren, black Spock Tim Russ, filmmaking genius Bruce Campbell, Clyde “The Glide” Drexler, hater-of-Catholicism and writer of fiction Dan Brown, TV personality Carson Daly, top ranked golfer (in addition to being the dude banging Paulina Gretzky) Dustin Johnson, and somebody who goes by the name “Bob the drag queen”, whatever that means.
Mutineers set Henry Hudson adrift in Hudson Bay on this date. He was never seen from again. Galileo was forced to deny heliocentrism by the Pope, the first Continental Currency was issued, Napoleon abdicated his “throne” for the second time after getting crushed at Waterloo, the first ring doughnut was made, the US Government created the Department of Justice, the first passenger airship , named the Zeppelin Deutschland, took flight, George V, under which the British Empire reached its greatest size, took the throne, the aforementioned John Dillinger is named “public enemy No. 1, arguably the biggest military blunder of modern times, Operation Barbarossa, begins, Tricky Dick signed legislation setting the voting age at 18 across the country, John McEnroe threw his famous tantrum and Whitey Bulger was finally arrested.
Now that’s a lot better than yesterday, in my opinion. And there was a bunch of shit I left out too! But I had to. Otherwise I’d have never gotten to…the links!
Looks like in addition to dying “in darkness” Democracy will die because of the jacket Melania Trump wore for a few minutes yesterday. Way to go, WaPo. I’m sure a Pulitzer is just around the corner for this bit of hard-hitting news. Next thing you know, you’ll be reporting on what kind of salad dressing President Trump had relative to everybody else at lunch.
I’m just kidding. That was actually breathlessly reported on by VOA and NPR. Seriously.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the biggest pussy in America. Shocking that he’s facing charges and has been fired, which should be a relief to pre-teen children across the Wichita area.
Charles Krauthammer, Pulitzer Prize winner and war monger, has died. The world is no worse off for the loss.
Enemy of freedom.
Well it turns out that John McCain is a bigger piece of shit than even we believed him to be. Seriously, telling the IRS to audit PACs because the SC struck down your campaign finance law is a slap in the case of separation of powers, let alone a direct attack on the First Amendment. That man needs to be charged with conspiracy to deprive the first amendment rights of every single group targeted by Lois Lerner and her jackboot goons. I cannot stress enough how gross a violation of our rights to peaceably assemble and petition our government for a redress of grievances this is. It attacks the fundamental foundation of a free people.
Is this what Alanis Morrissette would call “ironic”? I would. I’d also call it hi-lar-i-ous!
OK, this shit is getting ridiculous.
Delta Airlines is banning pit bulls as service or “support-type” animals on their flights. And people are angry about it. Here’s a bit of advice, Delta: ban ALL dogs that aren’t service animals for the blind or otherwise physically disabled. The rest of your passengers will thank you and you can avoid headaches with breathlessly retarded people who can only fly if their Great Dane is standing beside them. Let those fuckers pay to crate and ship their dog like everybody who wasn’t blind had to do before the whole “support animal” bullshit craze kicked off a short while ago.
Chicago medical examiner is so lazy that she wants to do away with the law that actually requires her office to visit crime scenes. The reason is simple: people in her office don’t follow the law anyway, so better to abolish the requirement rather than expect these public officials to follow it. And furthermore, I mean who needs to look at a crime scene to determine cause of death anyway, right?
New Hampshire is rightfully pissed off over the Supreme Court’s Wayfair decision yesterday. Yeah, so is every small business owner in America who will be required to comply with the tax laws in 50 states, DC and several territories.
And lastly, Angela Merkel finally realizes her job is in jeopardy. About time you listened to your own citizens, dumbass.
Have a great day and a better weekend, friends!
Well it turns out that John McCain is a bigger piece of shit than even we believed him to be. Seriously, telling the IRS to audit PACs because the SC struck down your campaign finance law is a slap in the case of separation of powers, let alone a direct attack on the First Amendment. That man needs to be charged with conspiracy to deprive the first amendment rights of every single group targeted by Lois Lerner and her jackboot goons. I cannot stress enough how gross a violation of our rights to peaceably assemble and petition our government for a redress of grievances this is. It attacks the fundamental foundation of a free people. – this is precisely what I would expect a Koch shill to say. I am on to you sloopy
Well it turns out that John McCain is a bigger piece of shit than even we believed him to be.
No, he’s exactly the piece of shit I imagined him to be.
You imagined he was behind the IRS targeting political groups in order to shut down their political speech?
Damn, dude. Not even I suspected he was that evil.
The old megalomaniac didn’t like it when the Tea Party groups started targeting him. That was pure political payback.
Fuck him, may he suffer his last days.
I can imagine that he’s far more evil than even that.
Yeah. I can’t imagine what would lower my opinion of him as a statist, self-aggrandizing fuckstick.
How dare you question a man who used daddy to go to Annapolis and crash 3 planes. How dare you question a man who dumped his first wife when he came home from prison and married someone rich and 2 decades younger. Only heroes slough off wives with cancer and parlay getting shot down because he never should have been there into a Senate seat.
Shame!
How dare you question a man who used daddy to go to Annapolis and crash 3 planes. How dare you question a man who dumped his first wife when he came home from prison and married someone rich and 2 decades younger. Only heroes slough off wives with cancer and parlay getting shot down because he never should have been there into a Senate seat.
Shame!
Double shame!!
You forgot the Yanks helped the ‘Stros by sweeping the Mariners.
Oh yeah. Now if only our hitters could produce a few runs for Justin Verlander.
Verlander really does get terrible run support.
Cesastion of cerebral function.
Without fail.
Democratic Underground is definitely dead.
zing!
New Hampshire is rightfully pissed off over the Supreme Court’s Wayfair decision yesterday. Yeah, so is every small business owner in America who will be required to comply with the tax laws in 50 states, DC and several territories.
In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that states can require internet retail companies to collect sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence, citing evidence that the rise of e-commerce has deprived states of billions in revenue. – what does lost state revenue have to do with the constitution?
We’ve told you about the invisible FYTW clauses, right?
It’s THEIR fucking money! Now shut up and pay, tax cattle!
Some people somewhere are doing something voluntarily. Must be taxed, regulated and spied on.
What’s fucked up is what I believe is their reason for the change:
It is easier and more popular to threaten the professional licensure and livelihood of an out-of-state vendor then it is to prosecute non-payment of existing use taxes by residents.
Well they can all eat shit. I never made myself subject to North Dakota or California or Vermont laws when incorporated in Texas. All I did was make goods available for sale IN MY STATE. If someone from elsewhere wants to electronically enter my state and purchase something, then the onus is on them to comply with the tax laws of their state. And their state government can eat my fucking asshole.
It will be interesting to see if this ends up serving as a pretext for expanding state jurisdictions outside their borders in other areas as well. God knows there’s already enough controversy about residency and income taxes.
This. The state of MA sued a regional tire company to force them to collect MA sales tax in their NH stores from customers whose cars were registered in MA. Taxachusetts lost the case, but given yesterday’s SCOTUS decision, why couldn’t that ruling be overturned? Right now, a MA resident would avoid paying sales tax if they drove to a NH store and had their tires changed, but if they ordered tires online from the NH store and had them delivered to their home in MA, they have to pay MA sales tax?
As I mentioned in passing yesterday, this is going to funnel e-commerce more toward the big players like Amazon and E-bay in order to make the sales tax issues transparent to the small companies actually producing and selling the products. I currently have both an Amazon store and a store on my company web-site, but I am likely to re-direct everything to Amazon now, so as to avoid the sales tax issue.
This doesn’t help businesses like Sloopy’s, but I expect new businesses to start popping up to support use cases like his in the next few years, assuming Congress doesn’t pass legislation that makes it even more complicated in an effort to “fix” things.
I presume the pretext is that the transaction takes place over state lines.
Does anyone know if in the past paper catalog sales across state lines were required to include sales taxes?
Does anyone know if in the past paper catalog sales across state lines were required to include sales taxes?
That’s a damn good question. Not sure where to to try to find the answer.
I’m 99% certain they did not.
They were not. Most states however have a use tax, which residents are required to pay for any goods purchased across state lines that are used in the state (catalog/online/etc.). From my understanding, very few people are honest with this portion of their taxes.
That actually IS in the constitution as an enumerated power. “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”
Now of course, that power has been abused beyond recognition (Wickard vs Fliburn, which led directly to Gonzalez vs Raich, being a prime example), but I think that this sort of thing, though stupid and immoral, is legitimate.
I am confused
I read this South Dakota sued the Back Bay-headquartered
So it was not the Federal Government who sued.
The Federal government wouldn’t have standing, I think. But it can, and in this case (through the SC) did, decide how regulation of interstate commerce can be effected.
Actually, a classic example would be a state imposing a tariff on goods from another state. The Feds can step in and stop that, even though it’s not their regulation.
Which is what the intent of the “among the several States” portion of the commerce clause was.
You’re saying the Feds can regulate interstate commerce by making people in one state subject to the tax collection laws of another state?
That sounds insane.
The federal government can regulate commerce through law or regulation. They can’t just say “every entity in every state has to collect taxes for California or a California court can throw them in jail for violating a California law. That’s not regulation. That’s subjecting a person in one state to the laws of another state because a resident of that state electronically came into the seller’s state to purchase something.
It’s stupid, but it’s neither insane nor unconstitutional. The seller takes money from a person in a remote state and delivers goods to them. It’s not like the seller has no connection with the remote state.
It’s FYTW, all the way down.
If all they did was require you to provide a list of all sales in their state with tax collected ($0.00) and they take it from there as Use Tax due by the recipients it wouldn’t be too onerous.
How does this not equate to taxation without representation (a slogan, I know) since the person on the hook for the tax is not allowed to vote on the taxation issue in the recipient’s state? I get that the state wants the money it thinks is due to it but the recipient should be on the hook since they’re the one choosing to live under that regime.
That’s the part I don’t get – how can a state impose a burden of collecting taxes on the state’s behalf on people who do not operate under their jurisdiction? Just like the Feds can’t require the states to use state resources to enforce federal law, the states shouldn’t be able to impose a burden of tax collection on the states behalf on entities outside of their jurisdiction.
“That’s the part I don’t get”
Whatever the reasoning, it’s harmful. The government should not be fucking around with the market like that because states are losing revenue. Which state is it that’s harmed? I mean which state doesn’t have internet? It’s called progress, so brick and mortar either needs to improvise, change, whatever. If they can’t compete, then so be it.
That would be great if it was the federal government being told to do something. But this ruling let’s states regulate the commerce “among the several states”.
Passing a federal tax on interstate transactions and distributing it among the parties to the transaction would be constitutional. This is granting the states a right specifically given toctge federal government.
That, while aggravating, would be tolerable.
For me, it illustrated what’s wrong with the news. This is a major decision that will impact every single American, and it was buried in the news amidst reports of jackets, long standing policies, and TDS. Like everyone else here, I pay more attention to the news than the average voter, and I almost missed it if not for a tweet of a lawyer I follow. If any of our news outlets had a shred of self respect and decency, they would have covered it.
Nope. Just more autistic screeching and celebrity gossip.
I grew up in a house where I was raised by two journalists. I love journalisim. Hell, for a hot second I was even in J school with dreams of working a beat.
Fuck them all with a rusty knife.
I’m wondering about county and city sales tax, must those be collected as well?
Sonabitch. Fucking sloop. That video of the cop shooting the kid ruined the nice buzz I had going. That cop should be… not gonna say it, just…fuck.
At least there was a silver lining:
…and that’s what’s important that the officer is “good”.
The guy was fired and should be convicted but I’ll eat my hat if a conviction happens. Juries eat that police officer feared for his safety bullshit up.
Dude, you should know better. Never watch the video.
I’m in the office and would get in trouble when I started throwing things.
And furthermore, I mean who needs to look at a crime scene to determine cause of death anyway, right?
To be fair, 9 times out of 10 it’s going to be “gunshot wound”. Of course if Chicago had reasonable gun control…
These people have a job to do. Insurance companies, law enforcement and a host of other groups rely on their accuracy. If it’s too much to ask of them I go to a death scene and do their job (which they’re all paid well over $100k a year to do), then they deserve to be fired and prosecuted.
I’m with you, I’m just being a smartass. Well, maybe just an ass.
Oh I know. I’m just fired up this morning over the Wayfair ruling and the John McCain story.
::serenity now::
::serenity now::
Every time I think I know just how big of a shit McCain is, he impresses me with even more Courics.
Satire is hard to spot these days. Luckily, the source admits to what it does, so the risk of mistake on my part was lessened.
Bonus satire of marxist terrorists
“one of the children had informed an Antifa thug that he was “going to get his dad,” causing the group to disperse rapidly.”
Perfect.
Great site!
New Ballot Initiative Proposes Dividing California Into Tiny Bits, Feeding It To Sharks
Christian Extremists Hit London
Father’s Day Updated To ‘Toxic Masculinity Awareness Day’
So from now on, instead of spending time with family, fathers just gather together, drink like fish and snort blow off hooker’s behinds? Awesome, now there’s some progress.
Hits home hard
Did Trump kill all 60 million?
Bill Clinton: ‘I Thought #MeToo Was A Pokémon’
The crying Honduran girl on the cover of Time was not separated from her mother, father says
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/06/22/the-crying-honduran-girl-on-the-cover-of-time-was-not-separated-from-her-mother-father-says/
awkward for Time if true
Truth is irrelevent in propaganda. Their target audience would never fact check the feelz of the composition anyway.
As long as it illustrates their point the specifics don’t matter.
The truth doesn’t matter, either.
Best Meme
Speaking of media bias the images in this twitter thread are interesting
https://twitter.com/Dawnsfire/status/1009865367001423872
Although I finding hard to believe that so many people find the media they like unbiased. A bit of intellectual honesty would go far.
Some of that is hostile media effect, but it’s still damning
I wonder how much of the stuff I read in Time when I was a kid was lefty propaganda.
If it was NYT, I could say with 100% certainty, all of it.
And that picture of the skinny polar bear on an iceberg has nothing to do with global warming, but that doesn’t stop them from using it for propaganda.
I give the Lakers an F on the NBA draft. Wtf that was awful
Hmmm was the rule for going off topic commenting on a number of links or waiting a certain time after the links are posted?
THERE ARE NO RULES!
THERE IS ONLY A NARROWED GAZE.
AND STEVE.
They’re making their move on the trade market. They drafted players other teams want specifically for that reason.
Also, who cares? The NBA is the worst pro sports league in America.
The NBA is the only entertaining, watchable sport in America you say? Yes I agree.
I don’t see who would want Moriz Wagner on trade. He could have been had with number 39 just as easily as 25.
The NBA is the worst pro sports league in America.
This is correct.
You forgot the “W” before that.
Silly Straffin, the key word was “Pro”
The No Fun League has signaled their desire to compete for that title.
New Hampshire is rightfully pissed off over the Supreme Court’s Wayfair decision yesterday. Yeah, so is every small business owner in America who will be required to comply with the tax laws in 50 states, DC and several territories.
On that subject…
So thanks to the supreme court I will more than likely be unemployed here pretty shortly. For the past 7 or 8 years I’ve been scraping out a very modest living building and selling legacy electronic parts to a very tiny (and diminishing) hobbyist niche through my own stand-alone website. Pretty much the definition of a “microbusiness” or “solopreneur” — I have no employees, low revenues but a high margin that’s just enough to keep me going. Because of the shrinking market it’s become increasingly untenable to keep operating for the last year or so anyway, and the likelihood is that I will not be able to continue operating profitably while remaining in compliance with the new tax collection scheme (or alternatively, giving ~35% of my money to Amazon to do it for me). Once I exhaust my current inventory of components, which will probably be around the end of 2018, I will most likely be closing up. My customers will no longer have acess to parts necessary to keep their equipment running as I am the sole supplier and the market is too small for a larger vendor to service profitably (which is how I came to be there in the first place). When I close up I will be releasing my build specs, p/ns and methods to the community, but very few of them will be able to DIY. This was probably bound to happen eventually anyway, but this just accelerates it substantially.
So to recap, a person who was operating a tiny little pissant sole proprietorship due to his distaste for the grinding monotony of a 9-5 job has to close up shop and become a wage monkey, while a community of collectors and enthusiasts of vintage equipment loses their only vendor for parts necessary to keep their hobby going, all due to compliance costs exceeding the value of a small market. An edge case to be sure, but still a microcosm of how these types of regulatory burdens snuff out businesses at the margins. And all usually in the name of sticking it to “big corporations”.
My business is growing like crazy and I’m starting to feel the same way. Compliance post-sale isn’t that tough with one state I have to deal with. Expanding that to 50 is going to cause me to rethink how I sell at live events.
That sucks, bro. Best of luck to you
How would they even begin enforcement against your operation? Or is it a matter of not wanting to role those dice?
Basically that. Not worth the hassle and risk given the money involved. Like I said, the market is diminishing and was eventually going to dry up completely anyway. Something that probably would have taken another 5 years or so just gets accelerated to immediacy.
Let’s say there was still demand after the sales tax goes through and you shut your site down, could you sell on eBay?
Are people sending stuff to you to be repaired?
Mostly retail. Very little repair/rework. Selling through a third party marketplace like eBay or Amazon would eat my margins down to the bone. I could keep it running a little over break-even. Which I might do just because I love the community and many of them are friends. But it’d have to be a labor of love at that point.
If you’re the only supplier, why can’t you raise prices?
My prices can’t go too much higher without putting off most of my customers because the cost of the parts as a percentage of the value of the equipment would get too high. As it is I get a pretty good premium.
Just a brain fart, but would it be possible to collaberate with other small businesses in the area?
Sorry dude. Small businesses (and their owners) take the brunt of all this bullshit. Dodd Frank, Obamacare, the list is endless.
I’ve been a small business person for my entire career. Every fucking politician loves to talk about how important we are. I mean, where would they be without powerless tax cattle?
And how much in political contributions have you given? How much have large businesses given?
I think you can work out the answer.
Sad to hear – I once tried to start a little audio business selling phono preamps but the margins weren’t good enough for me to keep going, so I closed it.
That sucks man. This decision is freaking retarded. I’m trying to start up an app, and going to pay sales tax in 50 states adds more retarded compliance. It’s all stupid.
I’m sorry to hear that.
I’m in the process of expanding from brick and mortar to online and this complicates matters significantly. With any luck, Congress will step in and put some limitations on it.
No, they’ll introduce some complicated prorating formula for splitting the revenue with the states where the seller lives, where the servers are located, where the carrier headquarters are, etc…
This guy gets it.
Amazon and a few other very large retailers can comply with that. But no small company will be able to. You’re not only talking about collecting taxes on everything according to each state’s rates, you’re talking about actually remitting that tax to all 50 states. If you can hire an army of accountants, then ok, otherwise…
As I said yesterday, the company I work for has a tax package that has to be updated yearly. It handles state and regional (and other!) taxes when we sell parts to other states. It’s a complicated – and hard to pull data from if you want to see the nitty gritty detail. I should ask what this software cost – I know it wasn’t cheap.
A lot of the stuff we sell directly to manufacturers I know isn’t taxed – ie, it isn’t reflected in the electronic invoices that we send. This may change. ??
Manufacturers, as re-sellers, are almost always sales tax exempt. VAT would change that equation.
Good to know – I’m def. not strong on finances as I should be but hey, shipping guy at heart.
It’s doable but it will have a cost. And the states are going to have to find me first.
I imagine they’re going to be looking for third party ways of finding out who is actually shipping into their state.
Just wait until they expand the ruling to county and city taxes as well. Ohio has 88 counties alone.
Amazon have their lobbyists ready, thank for the idea. /Bezos
Most states that have local taxes collect them at the state level and parse them back out to the localities. So in effect, this ruling is already expanded to them.
Most states that have local taxes collect them at the state level and parse them back out to the localities. So in effect this ruling is already expanded to include them.
On the bright side, the decision was apparently written narrowly enough that businesses under $100k annual revenue are likely not covered by this- it would be a whole new case.
If you tell me that the legacy parts you’re selling are vacuum tubes, I’m swooping in.
Would that be $100K total annual revenue or $100K revenue in any given state?
My understanding is that it’s $100k total.
That’s nothing.
I’m still under it, but yeah, it really is nothing. There’s a lot of little mom and pop outfits and solo sellers doing substantially more than that (and still barely making minimum wage on low margins).
The $100k is part of the S Dakota statute, it is not a rule imposed by the Court. Under the statute the requirement to collect/remit is limited to firms making 200 or more sales into S Dakota, or making $100k in sales. The problem with relying on that is that since the ruling killed the physical presence rule, States will be drafting and interpreting their sales tax rules expansively. In effect we KNOW that if you make sales over $100k or more than 200 into S Dakota you do have to collect and remit S Dak sales taxes.
We do not know anything about other situations/states/amounts except that the rule that protected retailers from having to collect/remit is now gone. Maybe the Supremes craft another rule eventually that restores that protection, but as of right now there is nothing.
“And, if some small businesses with only de minimis contacts seek relief from collection systems thought to be a burden, those entities may still do so under other theories. These issues are not before the Court in the instant case; but their potential to arise insome later case cannot justify retaining this artificial,anachronistic rule”
In other words the expectation is that yes, your mom and pop $1000 a year business does have to collect all State’s sales taxes now, but it’s ok cause if it unduly burdens you, you just have to fight the case back up to the Supreme Court and prove it, or get congress to pass a law… Your mom and pop store has a few million dollars to take one of those paths right?
100K in sales, or even in profit would be a very small company. 1 or 2 employees, so a single person probably. This pretty much sucks ballz if you’re not Amazon.
The decision was something Amazon loved for exactly that reason- they were already paying out sales tax, and now their smaller competitors have to do so as well.
They’re probably busy right now writing up an app for the state governments to use in catching the poor mom and pop business who are earning a few extra bucks online, but not able to comply. It sucks. Basically I’m relieved right now that I don’t have a retail business online. I have had before. No way would I attempt it now. Not only one state to comply with on sales tax, but 50. No thanks.
I’m not so sure about that. The South Dakota statute that formed the basis of the case was written with the 100k exemption, but I don’t think the ruling would necessarily preclude any other state from passing a statute without such an exemption under the authority granted to them by the decision.
No vacuum tubes. Specialty optical sensors, cable adapters, wiring harnesses and daughter boards.
Well, that’s dull.
If I read the decision correctly (and the usual I’m-a-scientist-not-a-lawyer disclaimer), changing that exemption would require the filing of a new case.
Nice. Hopefully that’s the case. I might be able to chug along for a while longer if so. I still need to get a real job at some point anyway. And I’m pretty sure my next one won’t be in online retail.
What kind of electronic parts?
Scrolls back. Oh.
Pat I think there are minimums in $$ and sales volumes that have to be passed before the new regs kick in.
Not sure but it sounds worth it for you to look into.
Switch to a “donation” module. Your “customers” might go for it since you are their only supplier.
The Nigerian Team is a bunch of good guys.
They’ve stated if they lose and fail to advance, they will refund the travel money of their supporters who made the trip to Russia.
All they need is bank account numbers and PINs, and they will transfer the money directly.
icwutudidthar
::golf clap::
::sends account information to Nigerian Prince::
I almost spit yogurt all over.
Merkel should be put on the end of a rope. How many thousands of molestations, rapes, murders and terrorist attacks has she colluded in?
Worth remembering that Hillary planned to bring in 1M people from a culture where pederasty and rape are cultural norms. Foreseeable consequences….
But we are the deplorables?
I dont understand why these pinko sociopaths want to destroy their own culture.
. How many thousands of molestations, rapes, murders and terrorist attacks has she colluded in? – that is just right wing propaganda
Because by destroying Western Civilization they can replace it with their Marxist paradise where they wield even greater power and wealth and the peasants have absolutely zero recourse or influence.
Basically old school Europeans had some standards left and did not vote any corrupt asshole. Destroy the existing culture and they can get power without consequence
Merkel was raised in EGermany and educated in a Soviet style brainwashing mill. I imagine the leftist madness we see on our campuses today are weak tea compared to that.
What the Krauts were thinking by electing her I have no idea.
TO be fair the alternative in to Social Democrat Party was not much better. How she became the leader of an allegedly conservative party is stranger. Off course her selected successor thinks that income tax should be above 50% so there is that….
“her selected successor thinks that income tax should be above 50% so there is that….”
So about a 10% increase. That will still leave them enough to pay their electric bill, and they have free healthcare! Gotta catch up with Denmark, they’re running out of other people’s money.
Merkel reminds me of a mix of Jimmy Carter and Hitler.
You know who else reminds me of Hitler… oh wait…
Mr. Hilter?
Yes?
I sure don’t like the sound of them boncentration bamps.
RE: Corruption case for judge…
You write about what you know best.
What are you talking about?
He founded the Hudson’s Bay Company (aka The Bay!)
I was surprised to discover that they were still around.
Barely.
http://business.financialpost.com/news/retail-marketing/retailer-hbc-reports-243m-third-quarter-loss-sales-down-from-year-ago
They really went downhill after the third album, though.
Fuck you Tony. You’ve obviously never had to deal with state sales tax bureaucracies and their sometimes insane paperwork requirements.
“In 6 or 7 years after you’ve spent a few million bucks on legal challenges through the appellate courts we might throw you a bone.”
Please sir, may I have another?
I will keep saying it.
Students should be taught about what it takes to open a business (and economics and finance) in high school; heck , they could even pretend to open one and see what they’re up against.
Interesting question: does this decision leave open the possibility that a business owner could bill a state (and deduct from tax remittances) the newly-imposed costs of compliance?
It’s an operating cost, so it comes off the bottom line.
Gosport hospital deaths: Prescribed painkillers ‘shortened 456 lives’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-44547788
More than 450 patients died after being given powerful painkillers inappropriately at Gosport War Memorial Hospital, a report has found.
An independent panel said, taking into account missing records, a further 200 patients may have suffered a similar fate.
The report found there was a “disregard for human life” of a large number of patients from 1989 to 2000.
Now not to get talking points out of something sad but I though only profit motive leads to bad things …
I thought it was Summer Solstice, turns out its groundhog Day with all these Yesterday Links
I actually search occasionally keywords to see of something was linked before. I searched for Gosport and found nothing. As I am not on the PM links I did not know it was linked.
It’s the Liverpool Pathway all over again. Just instead of denying care, they’re actively overdosing people to death.
Fucking animals.
STEVE SMITH sighting
(For those too lazy or otherwise unable to click, I took my son to a wildlife refuge. On the wildlife sightings board, someone snuck in a ‘Bigfoot’).
link
For those not to lazy the link does not seem to work
Edit fairy says there’s no URL to fix. Pls to try again.
https://scontent-atl3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/fr/cp0/e15/q65/35425378_10112005069316703_345516009995632640_o.jpg?_nc_cat=0&efg=eyJpIjoidCJ9&_nc_eui2=AeEMAVFPDolubUhOQqKNm5CdkoCkz25kRHIRnuB9MnjE2hU8AeVp5oYP7S64bvloN0ND7seYw6VY9lCfFO-wIRqB6v8bmccgR-n1la5_JjEKqg&oh=7f966ff69eda4a9d8d15f1cc2f760a6f&oe=5BEBA65C
I’m not clicking on that!
I’m shocked no one drew a dick on that board.
/disappointed in today’s youths
Paging Lachowsky to the white courtesy phone…
What’s the code for links? I tried to use the old “a href” thing.
angle bracket a href=”linkie” angle bracket words angle bracket /a angle bracket
Like so?
<a href=”linkie”>words</a>
Oops, forgot the ending semicolon.
/C++ programmer
Thanks.
I can’t find the link, just like no one can find STEVE SMITH
And one person named “Yeti” recorded seeing a “small foot.” Interesting…
*Technically* he was asked to GTFOH because he couldn’t prove it at the time. The Church was far from against his support of the Copernican system. The Church was far from ‘anti-science’. In fact, now that I think of it, the progressive left is far worse than the Church could ever be with, what, with their belief in man-made climate change, anti-straws and plastics, multiple genders etc.
Yeah, the story behind Galileo is more complicated than “THE CHURCH BANNED HIM BECAUSE IT HATES SCIENCE.” There’s a pretty good synopsis here:
Pretty much. And those scientists and mathematicians were often Churchmen/priests.
In a way, and I’m taking liberty with my analogy, the Priests of today are the scientists challenging the climate change orthodoxy.
A large part of the problem with Two World Systems was that Simplicio was a far-too-thinly disguised mockup of the Pope (who was a Borgia IIRC), and was depicted as a semi-retarded simpleton who could not comprehend anything but Catholic dogma. When you deliberately make the Pope the subject of extended ridicule, you could be in trouble.
If you’ve never read Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel, you should. It was her last good book.
This is what makes me so mad about the Leftist marketing/advertising obsession with “facts and science”.
People who are skeptical of some or all of the CAGW hypothesis are not “anti-science”. Some of them dispute that the evidence actually exists (and it’s indeed murky what with the “lost data” and everything). Some of them acknowledge the evidence, but disagree with the conclusions. Some of them accept both the evidence and the conclusion, but they disagree with the policy prescriptions. None of these positions are literally against the very idea of science. Science is not a group of human beings, it’s a mode of thought. Asking rational questions against a “consensus” is actually very pro-science. The real anti-science viewpoint is the one that says, “this is what this certain group of human beings believes right now, so everyone must also believe it and not ask any questions”.
As This Machine pointed out, it was actually most other scientists who were against Galileo. And Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis was ostracized by the entire medical profession when he came up with the non-consensus idea that physicians should wash their hands. A great number of new discoveries were shouted down as unscientific at the time. I’m sure there are all kinds of things we believe right now that will be discredited in a century or two, and people in the future will be amused that anyone could possibly believe such a silly thing. Does that mean we are all anti-science?
And there’s massive hypocrisy involved when the Left screams “anti-science” at somebody, seeing as how there is only one ideology that is literally arguing that objective facts don’t exist, and that’s postmodernism – a thoroughly Leftist creed.
Hard to believe that Doyle was played by this guy.
What’cha doin’ with that lawnmower blade Karl?
Dwight Yoakam is awesome!
Awesome! 2 of my favorites!
The rest of your passengers will thank you and you can avoid headaches with breathlessly retarded people who can only fly if their Great Dane is standing beside them. Let those fuckers pay to crate and ship their dog like everybody who wasn’t blind had to do before the whole “support animal” bullshit craze kicked off a short while ago.
I don’t think people bringing Support Animals are doing it because of emotional issues, they are doing it because they don’t want to crate their pets and, as far as I know, there are no other options than using this Support Animal angle. If the airlines were smart about it, they would drop Support Animals and add a high fee to allow pets on certain designated pet flights. It will increase their revenue and end the farce.
I would never crate my dogs. Of course I would also choose to drive across the country rather than fly with them if such a need arose.
Of course I would also choose to drive across the country rather than fly with them if such a need arose.
Absolutely. My dog flew back with us when he was a puppy. We were able to just bring him in a little carrier and everything was fine. I got the best service of my life, too. Seriously, I had flight attendants at my beck and call for the whole flight. Cute puppies, ftw!
But no chance in hell he’s going on a plane now.
I suspect dropping support animals would result in cataclysmic progtard caterwauling, followed by ass-covering and backpedaling on the part of the airlines, but I could be wrong.
Leftist snowflakes are more than welcome to take the trains they so love to foist on others.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the biggest pussy in America. Shocking that he’s facing charges and has been fired, which should be a relief to pre-teen children across the Wichita area.”
Well, at least maybe a valuable, possibly future life saving lesson was learned.
Kennedy went full “You didn’t build that” in his decision.
TOP MEN
There is nothing unfair – fair has nothing to do with the legality of the thing …
On the other hand you could argue that all of the benefits of the state’s infrastructure accrue to the buyers in the state who are able to source a wider selection of goods from the out of state vendor who is not using any of that infrastructure directly, but hiring a third party to use the infrastructure to facilitate delivery to the buyer. Not to mention that the skyways and interstates that serve as the principle means of facilitating those deliveries are paid for with federal taxes. East Bumblefuck Avenue would have been paved regardless.
This is purely about the state being either unwilling or unable to collect use taxes from individuals. It’s too hard for them to do so they want to go the easy route and fuck with out of state businesses.
I’ve had use tax audits in the past for my business as part of a state sales tax audit. I was correct to the penny on several million in sales, but they fined me because I didn’t pay use tax on 2 grand worth of Amazon purchases.
If they went after Henry Homeowner for use taxes, it would be expensive and there would be a political backlash, which is why they don’t want to do it. It’s far easier to co-opt businesses into fucking the consumer in a way that they don’t realize they’re getting fucked. This is true of most taxation and regulation.
As much as I loved Milton Friedman, I hope he has to serve a few centuries in purgatory for his role in creating income tax withholding.
Yes
Or you could also point out that Kennedy is a dumbass. Sales taxes don’t fund any of those items in a lot of jurisdictions. The land and income taxes do. And those would not change based on where we bought our chattels.
fuck him and that argument. Tge tax avoidance or evasion is solely on the buyer. There’s no assistance from the seller, who operates in a different state and never agreed to tax collection in the state the buyer lives in.
I’ll repeat this a hundred times: there are use taxes on the books. The buyers are aware of them. The sellers are not subject to the jurisdiction who wrote them. Therefore they’re not responsible for, or in any way assisting in, the tax avoidance.
This ruling goes so far as to diminish the agency of the individual and confers responsibility to their actions to an innocent third party.
I will never understand this logic that says you can force someone to pay for something so long as you declare it to be a benefit.
Can I stand out in the middle of the street and attempt to sing opera songs, then go to every house within earshot and demand $50 for receiving the “benefit” of my performance? Why not?
“that ensure the safety and delivery of the goods the company was selling to customers.”
Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward built their businesses in part on delivering to parts of the land mass that had no roads, no police, no fire departments, and no judicial system.
At least Kennedy finally admits that government is nothing but a protection racket.
“Well it turns out that John McCain is a bigger piece of shit than even we believed him to be.”
No, that’s not possible.
But he’s a Maverick! and all that. on the down side, he has managed to not die for much longer than anybody thought he would.
I’m surprised that McCain is not busy right now co-sponsoring a bill to prevent dying cancer patients from getting any treatments or pain medication. Of course as a member of Congress, he’ll be exempt. That’s how evil I think he is, which is why I say it’s not possible to overestimate how evil he is.
If he really wants to be a maverick, he should die sooner than the doctors thought he would.
We had to put down our eldest cat yesterday (he was 19 and failing in multiple ways). It makes me sad to think that Popcorn is gone and buried and McCain is still walking around.
Condolences. That is sad. We just learned that our 12 year old Lab/Greyhound has lung cancer. I am praying Steele outlives John.
Ugh. Sorry, Mike.
Thanks, buddy. Steele is my first dog, so this is all new to me. As he’s gotten older, the wife and I have talked about how hard it will be when his day comes. Turns out we had no idea how hard it really would be.
Not that it will help, but I’ve been through it multiple times. It never gets any easier, but it also never dissuades me from going through it again. The love and joy you get far outstrips the pain of loss.
Good luck.
I’m sorry for your loss. I would very much prefer the existence of your beloved companion over that of the incompetent Junior Birdman from Arizona.
Thanks to both of you. I just changed my avatar in memory of popcorn.
That makes 3 people and 2 pets so far this year. I hope the second half of the year is better.
MikeS–so sorry to hear about Steele. I hope he will let you know when it is time. One of the things we have struggled with for the past 3-4 months is trying to guess whether Popcorn was in pain or not.
Yeah, we are a little concerned about that. He also has arthritis that got bad recently. This was actually the reason we took him in. X-rays for that showed the cancer. So anyway, doc put him on carprofen for the arthritis pain. Not sure how that is going to affect seeing symptoms as the cancer progresses. For now, he is back to “normal.”
Like you said, not knowing if they are in pain is heart-wrenching. You don’t want them to suffer, but you also don’t want to end it all too soon. Ugh.
I’m hoping the second half of your year is less sorrowful, Spartacus.
I’ve been there. Never any easy thing to do.
Sorry, Spartacus. Even though he had a great run it still sucks.
The University of Exeter has apologised after students were emailed a quote from German World War Two general Erwin Rommel.
The email included a quote stating: “One cannot permit unique opportunities to slip by for the sake of trifles.”
Rommel, who was known as the Desert Fox, was commander of Adolf Hitler’s Afrika Korps and was promoted to the rank of field marshal.
A spokesman for the University of Exeter said: “A member of staff used the public, free-access website ‘Quotefancy’ to find a quotation for use as part of an internal email.
“This website generates suggestions randomly from thousands within its database, listed under different categories.
“Unfortunately, the staff member did not recognise the name attributed to the generated quote.
https://news.sky.com/story/university-of-exeter-sorry-for-emailing-quote-from-nazi-erwin-rommel-to-motivate-students-11411926
So? Rommel was a rather capable general, and respected by his enemies.
But… but… nazi
Yeah. The Nazi that plotted to kill Hitler. Planned to surrender his army to the allies. He was caught and then committed suicide to save his family from repercussions. That Rommel?
Those who do not learn history are condemned to repeat it. Looks like Europe is the poster child for that. I guess that is the whole point of the left’s whitewashing of history.
Is the British Army now going to disregard the Infiltration Tactics Rommel contributed to in WW1?
“Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!”
“Fuck bitches, get money” – Abraham Lincoln, 1963
I can’t remember which show I saw this on, maybe some PBS documentary. A US army tank officer told a story about when he captured some surrendering Iraqi tank guys. The Iraqis saw a picture of Rommel put up somewhere and said “why would you honor your enemy like that?” The American said he told them “maybe if you would learn from enemies as well as friends you wouldn’t have lost the battle!”
Um, yeah that’s great advice and all but I bet there are a few other factors that made the battle uneven.
ad hominem is all they have anymore
*sighs, crawls off hot rock*
You know who else wanted to motivate his minions?…
*slinks back to hot rock in disgust*
Gru?
Professor Moriarty?
If anyone is into old Chicago Blues, I can recommend this CD set called Double Trouble: The Cobra Records Story
Great little stompin’ collection of 1950s music – like early Otis Rush
Thank you, that looks most excellent. In way of reciprocation, please to enjoy some Hound Dog Taylor.
That’s a stripped down sound – gotta check it out some more when I’m not chewing on company bandwidth
HUH. I see that when the Cubs beat the Dodgers 4-0…they aren’t mentioned in the lynx. BUT…now that they lose to the Reds….THERE RIGHT IN THERE with the rest of ’em!
THIS AIN’T FAKE NEWS, BABY! EVAN’S GETTIN’ UPSET!
/Costanza
In all honesty, whenever Cincinnati wins a game, it’s news.
I am saddened by the lack of Twins love this year. Maybe after the metric football tournament is done…
Because we have all moved on to loving the Minnesoda Triplets Mike. Get with the program.
You make a very logical argument. You have persuaded me to your way of thinking. Go Triplets!
I bet they tell you to take your balls and go home….
LET’S GO SERBIA, SMASH THE SWISS!
*narrows gaze*
*hoists Chetnik flag*
+1 Sa verom u Boga, za Kralja i Otadžbinu!
(actually, I come from a partizan family)
The action kicks off with Oregon State-MSU in the afternoon and UF-Arkansas in the evening. Good luck to everyone. But not to the Gators.
GO GATORS!!!!!!!!
PS–please try to focus for 9 whole innings. kthx
Kennedy acknowledged concerns that “complex state tax systems could be a burden on small business,” but said there are already “various plans” in place to simplify collection. He also left open the possibility that small businesses making limited cross-border sales could try to seek relief if they thought the collection process was overly burdensome.
But that was not the issue before the court and Kennedy did not consider Wayfair, a company with more than $4.7 billion in net revenue last year, to be one of those companies.
“What Wayfair ignores in its subtle offer to assist in tax evasion is that creating a dream home assumes solvent state and local governments,” he wrote, going on to list how state taxes pay for public services, like police, fire departments, and roads, that ensure the safety and delivery of the goods the company was selling to customers.
“There is nothing unfair about requiring companies that avail themselves of the States’ benefits to bear an equal share of the burden of tax collection,” Kennedy said.
Christ, what an asshole.
Caesar, of course.
Of course
naturally
So I throw the ball to Naturally.
No you throw the ball to Who.
Naturally
What?
Second base!
Re Shmerkle: Migration?
I thought it was a humanitarian refugee crisis!
Vox Says Hyenas Are Feminist; Hyenas Say “What’s Feminism?”
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/06/21/27981178/vox-says-hyenas-are-feminist-hyenas-say-what-the-fuck-is-feminism
Projecting your neuroses onto animals and then using it as the basis for reorganizing human society might just be why you don’t have any influence on human society. Marx and Engels were pretty stupid and morally bankrupt, but for the love of Christ lady, please just let the men do the thinking for you.
Well, we should definitely follow the example of hyenas. /derp
Goddamn it there is a sever reset today in my company. I will lose all the various things I set up in my work spaces.
Screw you guys, I’m going home
Reset? What?
Basically killing all processes on linux machines in the server farm…
I want to see a Croatia v. Serbia final. An 800 year old grudge match. Could you imagine? It would be epic.
I went to a CRO-SRB water polo match at FINA a few years back and damn well felt I was in the former Yugoslavia tension was so high. Riot cops were just outside the stadium. You never see shit like that in Canada. But I guess they knew about the rivalry. I even had one guy tap me on the shoulder telling me to tell the drunk French-Canadian stranger in front of me – who didn’t seem to realize where he was as he mouthed off jokes (they were pretty funny I must admit) and that the match was a metaphor for something else (and boy it was something else) – to shut up or else.
I looked back and saw a wall of Croatian jerseys staring back at me. I replied politely and to the effect of, ‘Gulp, yelp. I don’t know him. He’s drunk. He’s ignorant’. To which the man thankfully agreed in a thick Croat accent ‘Yes, yes. Ignorant’ as his son calmed him down – well, I think it was his son.
That was water polo. Imagine soccer! It has international incident written all over it. And then Trump can make peace there!
There was no Croatia 800 years ago
Whatever. 80 or 8000. Don’t they have a grudge going back a while?
It would still be epic.
I’m sure Pan has some delightful insights.
They definitely have a grudge, according to the Serbian college chick I whose pants I failed to get into. Although I don’t know that she cared much about it (she was born after the war in the 90s, I think, too).
I got into my Croatian girl’s pants.
*raises glass*
How did they fit?
Better than your mother’s pants!
Yes, it goes back all the way to 1929.
Then Croats decided death camps and genocide were the proportional response. I guess that’s part of being civilized Mitteleuropa
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
An old friend’s father was a soccer ref. He one time got tapped to ref a kids match between a Serbian team and a Croatian team. He called the game ~15 minutes into it.
To be fair, a good chunk of old immigration were Nazi collaborators (Croats) and royalist sometime-collaborators (Serbs).
Brazil should spend less time jawing the refs and just play. They’d probably be up by 2 if they did.
Par for the course for Brazil.
Fun fact: Brazil and Argentina have the most yellow and red cards in WC history.
They are absolutely dominating Costa Rica and have nothing to show for it. I hope Costa Rica scores on a counter to win 1-0.
Brazil stopped being ‘Brazil’ in 2002. Now they’re just a good team among many.
You know what? One more ling before I go
Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/feeding-gods-hundreds-skulls-reveal-massive-scale-human-sacrifice-aztec-capital
Except the Aztecs themselves bragged about sacrificing 80,440 people in a four day reconsecration of a temple complex. The conquistadors were not exaggerating what the Aztecs did. these people were proud of their faith.
Like most ‘sacrifices’ they had a dual purpose. There is not enough protein in a desert to support the population of a city so they borrowed protein from the surrounding tribes.
All you need to know about the Aztecs: Cortez and his men chose to approach the Aztec capital from upwind because of the stench of rotting human flesh. Then there is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Sw0VCtZs-g
Extermination was warranted.
” in a desert” you mean Jungle right?
No, the Mexican highlands around Mexico City are neither a jungle or a desert. It’s a high plateau region with a subtropical clime. Pretty nice climate most of the year because of the altitude.
Ah yes, Forgot about the Altitude
If by jungle you mean desert, then yeah.
You are thinking of the mayas. Still, jungle isnt that much different from a desert in that respect. All of the organic building blocks are locked up in the trunks of trees. There are zillions of bugs but as for animals, there aren’t that many.
I just listened to the Cortez Conquest episodes of the History on Fire podcast, which took a lot from Bernal Diaz’ accounts. One thing I thought interesting was the Spanish soldiers agreeing that Tenochtitlan was the most beautiful city they had seen, though they’d been on campaigns abroad in places like Italy, and presumably weren’t Spanish rubes. Apparently it was kind of a MesoAmerican Venice with canals and waterways running through stone buildings.
I liked the bit about how the temples were built at such an angle that the sacrificial victims would tumble all the way to the bottom when they were tossed down the stairs after having their hearts removed, and how this causes an inconvenient number of tourists to die when they slip. Still working as designed hundreds of years later – that’s the sign of quality engineering.
Historical fact: the Aztecs almost wiped out Cortez, but crucially failed to when their entire squadron of fighter-bombers couldn’t maneuver in the thin mountain air and flew directly into the side of Popocatépetl.
Was that the Macho Grande mission?
La Noche Triste
But without planes
Man I kept googling that little anecdote and can’t find any info on it anywhere. I’m sure if it really happened there’d at least be *one* news article written about it.
There is not enough protein in a desert
Both deer and turkeys are indigenous to Mexico. Fishing is common across nearly every culture with a coastline–Mexico has two. Mexico is a big country with a variety of ecosystems, and yes the Aztecs ruled nearly all of it at the time Cortez arrived.
All you need to know about the Aztecs: Cortez and his men chose to approach the Aztec capital from upwind because of the stench of rotting human flesh.
No. Cortez was welcomed into the city by Montezuma. He had no choice in his route because the Aztecs controlled the bridges to the city, as Tenochtitlan was built on a island in a lake.
You can read about their encounter here in a letter Cortez wrote.
Extermination was warranted
LIBERTARIAN MOMENT
I must have this whistle.
Had a chance to buy one from one of the vendors while I was in Chichen Itza back in February. I passed.
I didn’t see anything like this at all around Tulum.
“Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital”
Nuh uh!, those were noble savages until whitey came along and screwed up the entire world.
Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital
*Leftist gets erection*
Nechochwen
ZARDOZ approves, I assume.
That’s uh, pretty sick.
General Sir Charles James Napier:
An edge case to be sure, but still a microcosm of how these types of regulatory burdens snuff out businesses at the margins. And all usually in the name of sticking it to “big corporations”.
A tragedy, to be sure, but your livelihood is a small price to pay to allow a senile old man to signal his virtuous empathy to the howling mob.
That money belongs to society. You are merely the vessel in which it is to be transferred.
Freaky Friday: This Guy’s Got Cajones Edition
Needs appropriate music
I have been in the water within a few feet of them before but I wasn’t going to let them get close enough to touch me. Standing waist deep and casting a jig would bring them out. They would swim up about ten feet away and I decided to ease out of the water.
When I was 15 or so, a friend and I were horseplaying in the canoe in the canals behind our houses. We capsized and were close enough to the bank to touch bottom but as we were righting the boat we noticed that we were standing next to a large earthen mound with a hole in the side and about a dozen wee (10 – 12 inch) gator babies starting to crawl out of it. You’ve never seen 2 boys jump into a canoe and paddle away so fast.
Yeeeeah. That is a bad place to be.
He might not have his cojones for long if he keeps that up.
I am fully on board with the idea from a couple weeks ago that one ought to begin bringing a Support Honey Badger on one’s flights.
We’ve been watching this BBC show called The Hunt – which I highly recommend. After the segment on the Honey Badger I asked my wife if we could get one as a pet.
Answer: NO!
She did like the Ethiopian Wolf . It looks like a giant fox.
Neat.
“The okapi is my Gender Support Critter and the pangolin helps me deal with PTSD from the bullying. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”
Delta: What’s this?
Rufus: It’s Rufus III. He’s a jaguar. Duh.
Delta: We know that but why do you want to bring an efficient predator on the flight?
Rufus: Er, because he calms my anxiety down. What is it with you people?
If people could bring support honey badgers on planes, it could have stopped the bad guys on 9/11.
From the Wikipedia entry on the Honey Badger:
something something SugarFree
So someone says ‘Obama never lied to us’. I respond with ‘the lie of the year you can keep your doctor.’
They scream ‘false equivalence.
There’s no God.
I checked facederp this morning to see the response of the people I had been arguing with to the documents I dumped showing border patrol abuses of children, uncovered by goodthinkful progressive groups under the Obama presidency. I dumped them yesterday to refute the ideas that “only drug dealers or other criminals get their children taken away”, and that the border patrol would not systematically abuse their discretion. At the time they said they were too busy to read them and that they’d get back to me.
Today, silence.
My guess is that we’ll hear nary a word.
I saw your posts. It’s nuts.
One guy called Trump voters ‘astonishingly supportive’. Another said Fox doesn’t challenge the President.
The cognitive dissonance is hilarious. They truly think Obama didn’t have a cult of the personality or that MSNBC didn’t challenge him.
or ABC, NBC, or CBS. Or NPR, or WaPo, or NYT. Or Hollywood.
Can you provide me with these links?
here’s one: https://www.wkrn.com/news/national/teens-kept-at-virginia-center-say-they-were-cuffed-beaten/1254011527
How is “he didn’t lie” – “Ok, he lied but pointing that out is false equivalence” false equivalence? I think someone doesnt know what words mean.
More chilling? He got three ‘likes’. I got none!
The left do not know what a lot of words mean, so they make up their own meaning. Take for instance ‘liberal’ and ‘progress’. And now apparently ‘science’. Also ‘democracy’ and ‘justice’.
Not to mention problematic. That word doesn’t mean anything like how they use it in a sentence.
Perusing last nights links:
Michelle Obama
✔
@MichelleObama
Sometimes truth transcends party.
Laura Bush
✔
@laurawbush
I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.
Always, the law (*ideally, but we know how that goes…) transcends party. Why don’t you take a sad pic with a note on a piece of cardboard.
From what I gather “zero-tolerance”=”enforcing the law as written”=”bad”. To be sure, the law can be an ass. But that means that one must advocate that the law be changed to ones liking. As it stands, laws need to be enforce in order for the law as a concept to exist. This, incidentally, provides incentive to get rid of bad or ineffective laws. With regard to this immigration hysteria, the parents who bring their children across the border illegally are criminals and should expect to be treated as such. This means that they should be detained and necessarily separated from their children like any other parent who is arrested for committing a crime. Additionally, given the circumstance that this is an immigration violation, there are other factors that have been considered and addressed in immigration law such that the US gov’t attempts to prevent human trafficking and child abuse. You can disagree with immigration law for a variety of reasons. But don’t freak out just because there is a new guy carrying out the same laws that have been in existence and enforced throughout multiple administrations.
The way this whole issue is being framed by certain people makes my blood boil. It is pure dishonesty and propaganda. Case in point.
Hey! I posted that in last night’s links!
/high five
Nothing like leaving my high five up all this time!
*High fives Rufus*
Didn’t make it back around to this post until now. ///DoYouPeopleEvenWork?
“but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel”
Absolute drivel. So exactly how much ‘tolerance’ is the right amount and who are the lucky recipients of said tolerance? The most overly abused and misused word in the English language today and the one responsible for more injustice and evil is ‘children’. We need a new law. Every time a congress critter utters the word ‘children’, they should be taken outside, given 100 lashes, then be pilloried naked for a week while crowds of passerby hurl rotten fruits at them. Afterwards they may never run for public office again.
It isnt just propaganda, it is incredibly transparent that that is what it is. I dont think anyone actually buys it. It is fake outrage for the sake of going after trump and for virtue signaling.
The law is irrelevant. We need a ruler who feels the right way and virtue signals appropriately.
“it would be too costly for the county — facing an anticipated budget shortfall next year of $82 million — to get someone to the site of each suspicious death in Chicago and the Cook County suburbs.”
How much of that shortfall is due to paying politicians relatives to do nothing.
Priorities, man.
There were three dogs at Lowes yesterday. FFS. It’s inexcusable on airplanes because of the crowding and obnoxiousness, but at least people have a credible fear of flying. What service does a service animal provide at Lowes? One of the owners was a young woman tooling around after her boyfriend. Really, lady, you need a comfort animal for this?
Service Animals are not Support Animals. They are two entirely different things.
A Service Animal, to be a Service Animal registered through the organizations that grant that status, must have demonstrated obedience skills and must provide an actual service to a disabled person. So like, someone in a wheelchair can have a lab that picks things up from the ground, turns on light switches, etc. Or someone with a seizure disorder can have a dog who senses imminent seizures and alerts his owner to sit down and prepare himself for it so he doesn’t fall and hit his head. To get your service animal registered your animal has to actually demonstrate its actual function. “Soothing my feels” is not a valid reason. It has to be like “Fetches help if I pass out” or “guides me home if I have an episode and lose track of where I am”
A Support Animal is, in practice, basically bullshit. The standards are nonexistent, you just need to find some medical professional to write you a note saying you have some kind of medical condition.
Support Animals will ruin a good thing for people who need Service Animals. I would like to think they groups that do legit Service animal training and matching with people will be screaming for this Support animal garbage to stop.
How dare you question the critical support I get from my support Pomeranian!!!!
Does your Pomeranian roll?
I agree with you Chips. I have a friend, a single amputee, who has a puppy she is training to be a service dog. First, the dog is a pure bred poodle, which is a good breed for this job, but it’s an expensive dog. She didn’t want to take any chances on getting a dog that is difficult to train. They had to go to a basic training course together, and now they are in an advanced training course. All this takes time and money, and both the dog and the owner have to pass testing before the dog is a certified service animal. We had invited my friend to our house for a party, but she didn’t feel the dog was ready to handle a crowd yet. So they are very careful about how these animals will behave in public.
Contrast that, with someone taking any animal on a plane and just showing a note from a therapist.
Yeah I got a friend who’s got some kind of thing where she will just fall out at random. Her dog can sense it coming, and if he does sense it he like nudges the shit out of her and she sits down and eats a snack and that prevents it. She’s already seen more friction from retail people and restaurant staff, and has had to explain the difference between her legit Service Dog and the bullshit Emotional Support Dog thing.
It’s so narcissistic I have to pause for a moment and process just how utterly devoid of shame or self-reflection I’d need to be to walk into a business with my animal and claim I’m distraught.
A carpenter I sometimes work for takes his dog just about everywhere with him. Has the vest and keeps it heeled constantly, so it’s not flagrant BS, but it’s still BS. Dude’s a former volunteer deputy who apparently worked with dogs once upon a time, so now he has this big German shepherd-looking animal with him at all times. Nice enough guy, but yech.
Megan McArdle weighs in
The Supreme Court has been signaling for a while that it might go in this direction. A combination of technological change and the tax benefits offered by Quill have caused e-commerce to explode in the 26 years since the ruling. Meanwhile, the Internet has also simplified the problem of remitting taxes to so many different locations. With the rise of real-time computerized inventories and shipping, businesses can now easily break down their sales by state, and third-party software can help them calculate the appropriate taxes to pay to each government.
————-
As Roberts’s observation suggests, Amazon isn’t the only major online retailer collecting sales taxes. Best Buy and Walmart rack up far more in online sales than many “big” Internet retailers such as Wayfair, and they already have physical presences almost everywhere. The court’s ruling won’t affect players like these.
It will, however, affect companies like Wayfair, making it harder for them to compete against bigger retailers. Ultimately, the effect of this ruling will be not to keep tech giants like Amazon from stealing business from mom-and-pop shops, as critics of those firms might hope. Rather, the ruling will make it harder for upstarts to unseat massive incumbent Internet sellers that can afford to have a physical presence in every state, or to collect sales taxes even where they don’t.
Yeah, this will be a burden to some of those upstarts, but third party software makes it a piece of cake. There’s probably just some app you download to your phone.
I was just reading the other day about Etsy raising their seller fees (from, can’t remember: ~3.5% to 5%?) and a lot of sellers were worried about getting pushed into the red. I’m sure Etsy will be able to track and collect sales taxes for no additional charge.
Says someone who has never done it. States can be extremely antiquated in their tax collection mechanisms.
“Nothing to worry about, the ruling just entrenches incumbents by burying their competitors in compliance costs.”
Hot take.
Out competing is stealing business.
*facepalm*
CARD NEYMAR!
WTF?!
Neymar is gonna try again.
Neymar should be sent off by now. He should’ve been carded for simulation after the VAR-overturned penalty.
Look, getting cards is not Neymar’s only talent. He can also fall down and play act with the best of them! If they start losing, he’ll need to leave the game with a fake injury to save face.
The dumbest part is that if he’d stayed on his feet he had a huge empty open net right in front of him. He’s 99% likely to score.
I left out the part where he sustains fake injury if they’re going to have to play Germany.
The Germans dive too. Not as shamelessly and at that rate but they all do it. But VAR is gonna eventually slow it down I reckon. I hope.
And the fucker ended up with a goal.
Actually that’s not exactly true. The French tend to stay on their feet more than most. They hardly look for dives. They get points for that. Plus they’re solid as a team.
He’s good if he can stay on his feet long enough. He’s down more than a cheap hooker.
He did a neat little throat slitting gesture after scoring that really showed his true class.
“He did a neat little throat slitting gesture after scoring that really showed his true class.”
Not sure why soccer doesn’t yet have a 15 yard unsportsmanlike for that yet. What type of barbarians are these?
I don’t know who is worse: Neymar or Ronaldo.
Neymar is crying in the center of the pitch. What a fucking disgrace.
I’m ba-ack.
Never go to Disney in the summer, idiots. Or me, idiot.
Also, I’m surprised that there’s still an Ayn Rand quote on the wall in the America pavilion at Epcot. I figured people would complain about that. Also, they sell stuff like sombreros in the Mexico pavilion. And I’m still surprised nobody complains about It’s a Small World being cultural appropriation/racial stereotyping.
Never go to Disney
in the summer, idiots. Or me, idiot.FIFY
I’ve only been to the Disney in Anaheim – and that was back in 1983. I don’t know why anyone – at least from the viewpoint of an anti-social misfit – would want to take a vacation at a crowded spot like that.
A mile or so from the acreage I own there is a large sports lake with cottages crowded all around it, and the sand dunes are busy with off-road vehicles. The place is packed during the summer with vacationers. I can’t stand it and stay clear of the “town” until the leaves fall.
Which was more horrific, the heat or the lines?
The heat. Easily.
Just for you JB
LLENN cosplay by her voice actress, Tomori Kusunoki
I’m a sucker for a cute girl wearing all pink holding a pink P90.
“It mocks the mothers who have lost their children and it mocks those babies we heard wailing on that tape,”
Honestly, they should have known this is how the message would be portrayed. I’m all for giving the press a middle finger, but this just makes it easy for them to portray Trump as evil and uncaring. Bad optics.
Didn’t she wear it on the plane and take it off before the facility visit or is that not the case? If she actually wore it to see the kids then I’d concede they dropped the ball, if not I’d have to disagree.
She did. But it leaves open the possibility for it to be framed that way. Do you think the majority of the msm is going add that she wore it on the plane and NOT to the visit? I think that will be conveniently overlooked.
“It mocks the mothers who have lost their children and it mocks those babies we heard wailing on that tape,”
The “I’m rubber, you’re glue” redirect. Brilliant.
Going to a record/cd show tomorrow – and also test drive a used Dodge Challenger R/T with a 6-speed manual. I’ve never driven a Dodge (or Chrysler) product in my life except for a horrible Avenger rental, and it’s been awhile since I’ve driven such a big vehicle. I’m sure it will feel like a tugboat compared to a MINI, but finding fun stick-shift cars that can fit a 6’6″ teenage son, myself, and ze wife is getting difficult. That nixed the Camaro and the Boxster or Cayman I had my heart set on.
Be curious how your family feels about the back seat.
I own a 2007 Wrangler JK. It’s been relatively trouble free, especially for a first year model auto, but the fit and finish and quality of the the interior lives up to Chrysler’s reputation.
Does the back seat of the Mustang have the same issues as the Camaro? My issue with the Camaro is the high “belt-line” and the lack of visibility. The Mustang is much better in visibility.
I didn’t mind the Mustang rental we had in SC a few years ago – 2013 model? Worked okay for the three of us.
The Camaro backseat is tiny… and, as you mentioned, the visibility is pretty bad. I don’t like the “floating head” effect with these cars – ie, when you see the driver/passenger, all you see is their top of their shoulders and head.
Supposedly the Challenger can fit four adults “in comfort”, more of a tourer than a real sports car. We shall see.
How about a GTI, still too small?
It’s a great car. I don’t know about 6’6″ people in the back, though.
Too VW? (flashbacks to the days when I did the work on my-then GF’s Rabbit)
I have three and love them. If you buy a new one, they have a terrific warranty.
* note I had my heart set on the Porsche, not the Chevy. But a two seater isn’t going to fly with She Who Must Be Obeyed, even though she gets away with a tiny car with a backseat I have to sit sideways on.
Also looking at WRX, Focus ST, BMW 2-series, and Mustang
My understanding is that there are some good deals on leftover 2017 Focus RSs as well.
I was seriously considering that now that Ford is getting out of the US “car” business.
I’m heavily considering an RS my self.
If just to be able to yell out “FOCUS ARSE” randomly like tourettes in a movie theater.
I don’t really care about comfort or performance, I can’t afford one anyway, but the Challenger is beautiful car.
It ’tis – and it’s one of the last cars that reminds me of the stuff I lusted after when I was a teenager.
The Challenger and the MINI are the only two reissues that really kept the flavor of the original.
I liked the mid 2000s when the mustang went back to the round headlights as well.
My wife’s current ride
Love it. Such a cool car.
That picture of McCain is great Sloop. It really catches his essence.
Also, VERY cool musical selection. I’d never actually heard Kris sing that song. Very cool.
Well, finally, they’ve got him this time.
Again
They’re going crazy at DU, this is it, finally.
It seems fitting that Tom Arnold would be their savior.
I like it better when it was the ho, this guys not interesting at all. BORING!
He’s definitely a giant asshole so he’s got that going for him.
So, any leftist?
Pretty much.
They’re determined to dee him re-elected.
Damn, there’s the smoking gun, any day now!
Tom Arnold says he’s teaming up with Michael Cohen and ‘taking Trump down’
Have you considered that you, Arnold, may fall victim to the ultimate troll?
I’ve been enjoying the Hell out of The Barbarian Empires of the Steppes by Prof. Kenneth W. Harl, Ph.D. during my overnight wear headphones and be left alone shifts. 18 hours of wonderful history porn.
Looks pretty cool.
‘Contrary to your fake history and lies, we’ve found evidence those were feminine societies where the men were warm and cuddly family types who spent most of their time weaving baskets and making herbal tea.’ /progs
Especially that Genghis Khan. He was such a feminist.
It’s quite fascinating to see the cycle play out – strongman unifies barbarians and they get uppity, civilized nations fight back but it proves too costly to effectively prosecute a campaign against an enemy who refuses to engage in set battles, civilized nations pay off barbarians and encourage them to fight amongst themselves, internecine squabbling leads to unification under a strongman, wash, rinse, repeat. Then it turns frustrating when one realizes it has been the same cycle for 4000 years.
police bodycam footage shows Kansas cop open fire in a room full of CHILDREN – hitting a nine-year-old girl in the face
There is so much wrong with this. Firstly, why didn’t they turn on the lights? And why did they need to find the gun in the first place? And why the fuck are you that trigger-happy when there is a small child directly in front of you?! This guy should have been fired on the spot and then charged with something along the line of assault with a deadly weapon.
*reads further*
Betts was fired from the Wichita Police Department less than a month after the incident.
He now faces a felony charge of aggravated battery, to which he has pleaded not guilty. His trial is set for August 20.
Ok…
Betts is believed to be the first Wichita police officer to face a criminal charge from an on-duty shooting that resulted in injury or death in the last two decades.
His defense attorney claims that Betts was ‘not reckless’ but was trying to ‘avoid being attacked by this vicious dog’.
It was patently reckless to fire willy-nilly into the dark when you knew children were present in front of you. And vicious? The dog barked. That’s all. Let the jury watch the video in full. In a just world you would be totally fucked. Also. I wouldn’t be surprised if the girls father made the transition from suicidal to homicidal.
He won’t be convicted, should be but won’t.
Or the father charges for idk reckless endangerment?
The future ain’t what it used to be.
Police in Tempe, Arizona said evidence showed the “safety” driver behind the wheel of a self-driving Uber was distracted and streaming a television show on her phone right up until about the time of a fatal accident in March, deeming the crash that rocked the nascent industry “entirely avoidable.”
A 318-page report from the Tempe Police Department, released late on Thursday in response to a public records request, said the driver, Rafaela Vasquez, repeatedly looked down and not at the road, glancing up just a half second before the car hit 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, who was crossing the street at night.
According to the report, Vasquez could face charges of vehicle manslaughter. Police said that, based on testing, the crash was “deemed entirely avoidable” if Vasquez had been paying attention.
Where’s my self-flying car?
Driverless cars are current ‘feel goodz’ technology of the future. Those things never work out as well as envisioned.
Dog represents opportunity to shoot their gun without getting into trouble. He can also brag to the ladies later about how his life was in danger from some childrens family pet but his tactical skills kicked in.
My issue with the Camaro is the high “belt-line” and the lack of visibility.
I was talking to somebody not long ago who said she has ridden in a friend’s new Camaro a few times. She says you cannot see a fucking thing out of that car. In any direction.
When everything is behind you, you don’t need to see.
OK, Enzo, but try backing that fucker into a parking space!
No cameras on a $30k car?
I’m still turn my head. Can’t break the habit.
Although I LOVE the camera for hooking up a trailer.
All 18 or later cars are supposed to have back-up cameras, but back-up camera doesn’t fix the massive blind spots in the Camaro when your going down the road.
The last one I sat in reminded me of sitting in the driver compartment of a Bradley (which is like driving while looking thru 4 fixed direction straws).
I had one as a rental and I agree entirely, like looking through a mailslot. Nice car to drive, even in rental car guise, but terrible to see out of
Also looking at WRX, Focus ST, BMW 2-series, and Mustang
Fuck it. Get a ’64 Lincoln Continental.
I loved my old WRX, but I’m not a fan of the look on the current one. It’s like they got partway through designing the body and said “Oh, shit, it’s due by 4 pm today.”
??? Rolling in style.
Two of those three should be enjoyable while the first one will probably look like a dramatic reenactment of the Charles Whitman shooting spree with all the flopping that’s been going on from South- and Central American players.
Called that right.
Last month, an Uber spokeswoman said the company was undergoing a “top-to-bottom safety review,” and had brought on a former federal transportation official to help improve the company’s safety culture. The company prohibits the use of any mobile device by safety drivers while the self-driving cars are on a public road, and drivers are told they can be fired for violating this rule.
That’ll fix it.
Holy shit, the Supreme Court just made a ruling IN FAVOR OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE FOURTH AMENDMENT! I THOUGHT IT DIDN’T EXIST ANY LONGER!
(Carpenter v. United States. Court ruled that police need a warrant to get cell site location information)
(I always hit send too quick)
This is huge, because it’s a blow to the bullshit third party doctrine.
Disappointing to see Gorsuch siding with the statists.
All the conservative judges except for Roberts thought not having a warrant was hunky dorey. It’s a win but that’s very disappointing.
The problem with the conservative argument here is that completely ignores the part where the government, post-9/11, strongarmed every telecommunications company* into becoming an enforcement arm of the government. So, while Thomas is right that a telecom provider could transfer ownership of location information in its contract with the consumer, none of them do because they know that they’ll get punished by the government (whether via backdoor warrants like NSLs, the broad application of the “third-party doctrine” as general FYTW clause, or, perhaps most significantly, the loss of lucrative contracts and other monetarily beneficial arrangements with the government).
However, the conservatives on the Court seem utterly uninterested in dealing with that related matter, and so the argument here rings hollow.
* = Other “tech” companies, like Microsoft, Google, and Apple, have offered more resistance to the government’s demands, at least for the time being and as far as is publicly known
Gorsuch apparently dissented on that. Ironically, it was mostly the progs who voted with Penaltax.
Wayfair decision
I can’t be the only one that thinks this fly’s in the face of the commerce clause. The entire point of the commerce clause is to keep commerce among the states “regular”, meaning that states cannot impose taxes on imports from other states. It seems to me that requiring the collection of out of state sales taxes functions to do exactly that which is prohibited. Am I wrong here?
You have money they want. They will do what’s necessary to obtain it. The Constitution is secondary to rule #1: the government owns you.
It’s Friday yeehaw! Celebrate with tits.
http://archive.is/ahvPN
2 has the ginger magic. 14 has got some seriously nice gams. 36 wins the cleavage award. 29 wins best in show.
One and done
So nice she’s in there twice!
But the nod goes to 38. She seems nice.
ginger magic
The magic of having no soul?
Were you gonna do something with that?
Souls are over-rated.
Nice collection. My tongue wants to play Marco Polo with 19’s body.
7, because she makes sammiches.
+1
also, hawt
Improvement over old behavior?
http://www.nbc4i.com/news/u-s-world/watch-priest-slaps-crying-baby-at-baptism-ceremony/1255922394
I suppose slapping it with his hand is preferable to slapping it with his dick.
He was trying to cure the baby of headache.
Because hitting a baby is how you make it stop crying.
“I don’t think any four of those children will ever trust the police again”
It’s a shame your daughter had to get shot in order to learn this important lesson.
OT:
I’m fucking sick to fucking death of hearing people whine about “chillens sepurated from famileeeeezzz” allegedly because of evil Drumpf. Some woman at work went on a rant about it yesterday, and she said, “Because if we stop helping each other, what do we have left?” Got that? Helping other people is good, therefore we should have unlimited and unvetted immigration.
She also said, “I mean, it says ‘give me your tired, your poor,’ and ya know!” Lose a point for not knowing the complete passage. Lose a point for not specifying what “it” is that says that. Lose a point for thinking that this line is somehow authoritative over US policy. Lose a point for conflating legal and illegal immigration.
Point out that Trump signed a (likely illegal) EO to stop separating them. When they continue to froth at the mouth ask them calmly and sincerely what their solution is. When they start spewing talking points “compassionate reform!” “common sense laws!” etc. etc. press them on specifics. They’ll go one of two directions: 1) They’ll finally be honest and admit they don’t believe there should be a border at all or, more likely, 2) they’ll shut down discussion and insult you in the process.
They are children.
Well, the latest thing doing the rounds among my well educated, objective, thoughtful academic friends is that Betsy Devos owns a company that gets custody of “confiscated” children then places them for adoption at a large fee.
Sounds like something ripped from InfoWars.
Yeah adoption to Big Food to make bread out of their blood. And who owns those companies? You know who. The same (((people))) who own all the things.
You are kidding, right?
That actually sounds like something they would say. I bet he’s not joking.
I hate her, she’s a horrible person! She should be donating them to us, we’re running out of orphans. All that salty prog tear barrel stacking is taking a toll!
I feel like there are some details missing here. While the media is an outrage machine rather than a journalistic exercise nowadays, if that were true, I’d expect them to be beating that drum a lot harder.
Surprise
U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska in Manhattan objected to the CFPB’s setup as an independent agency with a single director who can be fired by the president only for cause, not at will.
—————
The CFPB declined to comment.
The American Bankers Association, which has advocated for reining in the CFPB, said the implications of the decision “remain unclear,” because other federal courts have ruled differently.
The Center for Responsible Lending, a consumer advocate group, said it was a “clear and completely inappropriate example of legislating from the bench.”
Any time a judge does something somebody doesn’t like, it’s “legislating from the bench”. The CFPB was brought forth to do Good Works. Senator Warren said so. Why does this judge want to tie their hands in the battle against predatory lending and lawless usury?
Can he eliminate the entire agency at will? That’s what I’d like to see.
The CFPB was operating a slush fund for Democratic Party astroturf organizations. The fact that no charges have been brought against the previous administration for their blatant corruption in this regard irritates me to no end.
The entire agency should be burnt to the ground and the earth salted just for the BOA agreement.
Tenure is supposed to protect controversial ideas and unorthodox thought. Since academia seems uninterested in engaging in either one, tenure no longer serves a purpose.
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2018/06/frustrated-faculty-struggle-to-defend-tenure-before-its-too-late.html
It’s not “anti-intellectualism” to recognize that higher ed has largely become about propaganda, administrative bloat and shaking tax payers down for more lucre. Maybe if your jobs were performance-based we’d see more, well, performance.
What irks me the most is the fact that many colleges (or certain departments, anyway) are undeniably Leftist indoctrination centers. If the Mises Institute received half a penny of taxpayer money, Lefties would be marching with torches and pitchforks, but it’s totally fine that universities are blatantly promoting radical feminism, communist economics, and “social justice” ideas.
I’m just going to be lazy and ask. So, in the intertoobz tax decision, we know who 4 of the yes votes were without looking. Who was the traitor? Let me guess, Roberts, again?
Actually, Roberts wrote the dissent.
So, who was the traitor? I mean we know Kennedy, the old buzzard, Breyer, and the SotoKaganFuglyButchDyke monster voted yes… wait, it was just the five of them, right? I thought the court now had a super majority conservative? Is my math off?
Actually, it’s quite the odd grouping: Kennedy wrote the opinion joined by Thomas, Gorsuch, Alito, and Ginsburg. Roberts wrote the dissent.
FUCKING GORSUCH SUPPORTED THIS SHIT? Fuck that.
It’s the old issue with the rightwing judges: they’re not ideologues who seek to impose their will on the law, they give massive deference to precedent.
Yes, but I thought Gorsuch would be better than that.
yep. the “right” judges fucked up big time on this one. i have not read Thomas’ or Gorsuch’s concurring opinions yet.
maybe this is 95D chess and once small online businesses start to collapse under compliance burden, the federal legislatures will take up the issue to push relief/reform.
Tell me this isn’t one of the most pathetic things you’ve ever read.
This is like the anti-Bush fervor during the Iraq War, except juiced up to the nth level. It’s just going to get worse ‘n’ worse unless the left gets what they want, good and hard.
Why am I not surprised by the identity of the author?
Fuck you Bob. You don’t get to speak for everyone else.
See, this is one blatant example of how the left just pull shit out of their ass. They constantly, I mean constantly, claim that ‘most Americans’, ‘the majority of Americans’, support every single fucking harebrained idea that they just made up. It takes a special kind of stupid to believe anything they say.
It’s arrogance.
This goes back to the old “Nobody *I* know voted for him.” They are in their own little world. And I do mean little, compared to the great swathes of unwashed masses in the middle of the country.
“Japan in particular”
Because endless tension with an unhinged dictator that launches missiles over your country is somehow preferable to opening the door to at least some relations with said unhinged dictator? The only possible way, IMO, to see the developments with DPRK as negative is purely from TDS. If Obama had done the same thing, they’d be in a state of permanent orgasm.
He did much, much worse with a theocratic regime that authorizes the caning of women for failing to obey the diktats of an authentic patriarchy. Did the left voice so much as quiet demurral at the prospect of larding up his wholly one-sided deal with billions of dollars in cash? Did they even blink at the dubious notion of supporting a regime that in turn supports rapist psychopaths who traffic in no-shit sex slavery? Were there any qualms about inevitable nuclear proliferation from a country that routinely deceives and threatens its neighbors? Lefties hate this country, so I can see a certain gleam of sympatico when Iranian mullahs threaten to reduce American cities to ashes, but you’d think they’d evince at least a little concern for their neighbors.
Is it repulsive to see Trump fawn over Kim, sure. Do his critics, at least those on the left who had nary a problem with Obama bending over for the mullahs to receive his legacy good and hard, get to whine indignant over the scene? NOPE.
Most of the arguments about the “deals” with Iran and North Korea are about style and partisanship rather than substance. Any objective analysis of the two things is basically impossible because, to some, one was done by the light-bringer and the other by the harbinger of doom, while to others, one was done by a quasi-communist enemy-sympathizer and the other by “America, Fuck Yeah” personified.
To me, the bigger question is, what do we get out of it? The Iran deal bought us nothing but cost us something. So far, the North Korea deal has gotten us something but cost us nothing. Time will tell whether that characterization holds in 1, 5, 20+ years.
We are doing everything we can to ensure that he will not be president beyond his current term, which ends in January, 2021. It is possible he will be removed from office before then.
It is also possible that you will suddenly grow into a normal size human being. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
“Please do not lose faith in America”
Sod off!
Reich is a mendacious piece of shit.
Also, also all those European socialist can jump head first into a wood chipper.
Or into the barbarian hordes they’re importing, that will work the same.
Most Americans continue to value your loyalty and friendship, and look forward to many more years collaborating in the causes of democracy, equal opportunity, science, the environment, balanced growth, and human rights. And against totalitarianism, xenophobia, ignorance, climate change, nuclear Armageddon, and global poverty.
Odd. By my estimation it is many of our supposed allies in freedom and democracy* that are the ones heading down the rabbit hole of totalitarianism, ignorance, intolerance, and facilitating global poverty.
*US is a Republic, obvs.
The entire agency should be burnt to the ground and the earth salted just for the BOA agreement.
Wait, what? Extorting multi-million dollar settlements which go into the government’s coffers does not provide restitution for the consumers who were actually harmed?
Not just government coffers but then redirected to non-profits of choice.
https://cei.org/blog/consumer-financial-protection-bureau-slush-fund
cei? Do they know what that stands for on the creepier side of the web?
The current occupant of the White House does not represent the views of the majority of Americans. We are doing everything we can to ensure that he will not be president beyond his current term, which ends in January, 2021. It is possible he will be removed from office before then.
Nice. Go get ‘im, shorty!
Robert Reich is as crazy as Mika Brezvinskaya.
Does he have chicken legs also?
None of the people on the 2016 presidential ballot represented a majority of Americans. Maybe we should abolish the position.
So, does this mean the Republicans were right to go after Bill Clinton? He never won a majority of the popular vote and he won the election with only 43% of the popular vote in 1992.
I’m in Florida today with the son for a football camp. As we walked out of the hotel he said something to the effect of “dann it’s hot. No wonder everyone here goes crazy.”
Betsy Devos owns a company that gets custody of “confiscated” children then places them for adoption at a large fee.
No rape camp? I am disappoint.
That’s my job, son.
I’ve rarely seen or read anything by Krauthammer – but thought this was a nice quote:
“You’re betraying your whole life if you don’t say what you think, and you don’t say it honestly and bluntly.” — Charles Krauthammer
I’ve seen him occasionally on Fox, back 10 years ago when I still watched TV news. He came off as more of a Neocon than anything else.
That being said, he always seemed like an intelligent guy, able to articulate his ideas and make them come off as reasonable, even though I disagreed with him most of the time.
Yes. Seemed like a good guy who lived with his physical problems without making himself a mayrt. Often disagreed with his inside the beltway conservatism, but never despised him like I do McCain.
Because, mistaken or not, Krauthammer was a principled guy and McCain is just an evil POS?
Krauthammer was too establishment for me. Hell, he has no small responsibility for shaping the establishment as it is, but he was an honorable man. McCain, not so much.
I’ve read his columns for years.? He was very good at explaining the neocon position in a rational way. He was wrong more than right, but engaged in civil discourse and clearly articulated his position without resorting to the raving typical of the chattering classes.
Math is hard, let’s go revolutionary LARPing!
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/math-can-cause-collateral-damage-to-society-professor/
I found a part of life that is not completely corrupted by politics. THIS MUST BE STOPPED!
If we were able to gather these people together in one location, it wouldn’t be long to when they devolved to the level that we could just fence them off and turn it into a zoo for observing primitives living in the stone age, killing and eating each other.This would be the most value they’ll ever provide to society.
According to Ernest, this “collateral damage” happens in three ways. First, he argues, the styles of thinking involved with mathematics are “detached” and “calculated” ones, which value “rules, abstraction, objectification, impersonality, unfeelingness, dispassionate reason, and analysis” — which he claims “can be damaging when applied beyond mathematics to social and human issues.”
And here I thought that people who make life-altering decisions based on “feels” alone were the most dangerous fuckers on the planet.
That only counts for WIPIPO. And maybe some of them slanty eyed devils.
I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability.
Oh yeah, like when Collectivists apply absolutes to groups of individual humans who share superficial characteristics?
The vacuous nature of the thesis can be summed up by its own conflation of money with math. That is not some kind of advanced knowledge, it is just arithmetic, and it has been around since ancient times. Addition and subtraction are not oppression. This is like the anti-gun nonsense dialed up to 11. Just because the state uses multiplication to collect taxes doesn’t mean I abjure the entire concept of math.
Math does not cause the damage.
learning mathematics can cause “collateral damage” to society because it “provides a training in ethics-free thought.”
Wrong. It’s not ethics-free at all. You are taught to value logic, deduction, and precision of thought. This is hardly ethics-free, it is just a set of ethics that progs don’t like, because it makes them look bad.
Duckduckgo seeks volunteers to help audit Google search results.
IFL DuckDuckGo.
It’s maybe brilliant or maybe insidious that Google’s results are so much better tailored to me. I don’t know if that’s better algorithms or just the history I have using their platform.
There are times when it is very beneficial to me, like doing work-related searches. I’ve never had to contend with irrelevant results on Google. There are times when there are no answers to my question, but the searches listed at the top of my results always capture what I meant. Whereas, whenever I am forced to use Bing or even worse Yahoo, it’s either a mixed bag or full of irrelevant crap. It doesn’t help that technology companies and open source projects like to pick random, innocuous nouns of the dictionary for naming shit. It’s true that Java is both an island in Indonesia and the colloquial (albeit disused) name for coffee, but when I’m searching for something with “java” in the term list, I mean the programming language.
But to have my searches on current events, contemporaneous issues, or otherwise politically tinged topics tailored, either “for me” or in spite of me, is a lot less helpful and a lot more disconcerting.
Love DDG and volunteered for the “survey”.
This is what they’re asking for.
reading that Wayfair opinion… holy fuck Kennedy is a real piece of shit. Wayfair + Kelo. damn. that is some big govt legacy. i can’t fathom how this guy wrapped his head around McDonald, Citizens United, and Heller and came to the right conclusions in those cases.
It is harder to say with respect to Kelo, but at least in this case, the Court made it clear that Congress still has the prerogative to act. In other words, the pre-Wayfair status quo can be restored by an act of Congress. Indeed, the majority opinion, Roberts’ dissent (one of his few good decisions), and even the cases they overturned all stress that it is really Congress’s job to speak here, and the Court is acting only in that vacuum.
Urbanist porn
Call them Little Vehicles—not just bikes and scooters, but e-bikes, velomobiles, motorized skateboards, unicycles, “hoverboards,” and other small, battery-powered low-speed not-a-cars. Nearly all of them look silly, but if cities take them seriously, they could be a really, really big deal. Little Vehicles could significantly erode private car and ride-hail use, and play a key role in helping cities achieve their as of now unattainable environmental and road safety goals.
Getting to mass adoption will require Little Vehicles for all seasons, for all sorts of trips, and for all types of people. Solutions to these obstacles exist, and many more will surely be dreamed up. The bigger challenge will be de-conditioning ourselves out of the belief that cars—whether privately owned or for hire—are the default mode of transportation in dense cities.
This, of course, has been the urbanist’s dream since the days of Jane Jacobs and the post-war car boom. What’s changed is the technology (improved battery life has made today’s crop of tiny e-boosted contraptions far more usable), the economics, and, perhaps, the political will for human-centered infrastructure. Often cheaper, faster, and more fun than a car, Little Vehicles could provide the critical mass that finally drives the automobile to its knees in America’s big cities.
Yes, yes, of course. Any day now, Americans of all ages, classes and dispositions will toss their cars on the trash heap of history in favor of electric tricycles.
I am a lot more receptive to buzzing around in tiny (motorized) vehicles than most people, and I have no interest what-so-fucking-ever in exposing myself to the sort of risk inherent in maneuvering some trendy death trap like a hoverboard through traffic, even in some backwater one horse town in Montana. Manhattan or San Francisco? Never in a million years. There will be ethical suicide booths on every street corner before the widespread adoption of that sort of industrial scale idiocy.
*What has become popular out here is the use of side by side all terrain vehicles for short hops around town. It occurred to me one day that you could buy a really nice Meyers Manx for about a third of what those things cost.
Shit- I think my last comment got swallowed up by the two-link rule. I guess I’ll wait to see if it makes it through quarantine.
I’ll split it, which will guarantee that it will magically appear. Might as well fix the link, while I’m at it.
Urbanist porn
Call them Little Vehicles—not just bikes and scooters, but e-bikes, velomobiles, motorized skateboards, unicycles, “hoverboards,” and other small, battery-powered low-speed not-a-cars. Nearly all of them look silly, but if cities take them seriously, they could be a really, really big deal. Little Vehicles could significantly erode private car and ride-hail use, and play a key role in helping cities achieve their as of now unattainable environmental and road safety goals.
Getting to mass adoption will require Little Vehicles for all seasons, for all sorts of trips, and for all types of people. Solutions to these obstacles exist, and many more will surely be dreamed up. The bigger challenge will be de-conditioning ourselves out of the belief that cars—whether privately owned or for hire—are the default mode of transportation in dense cities.
This, of course, has been the urbanist’s dream since the days of Jane Jacobs and the post-war car boom. What’s changed is the technology (improved battery life has made today’s crop of tiny e-boosted contraptions far more usable), the economics, and, perhaps, the political will for human-centered infrastructure. Often cheaper, faster, and more fun than a car, Little Vehicles could provide the critical mass that finally drives the automobile to its knees in America’s big cities.
Yes, yes, of course. Any day now, Americans of all ages, classes and dispositions will toss their cars on the trash heap of history in favor of electric tricycles.
I am a lot more receptive to buzzing around in tiny (motorized) vehicles than most people, and I have no interest what-so-fucking-ever in exposing myself to the sort of risk inherent in maneuvering some trendy death trap like a hoverboard through traffic, even in some backwater one horse town in Montana. Manhattan or San Francisco? Never in a million years. There will be ethical suicide booths on every street corner before the widespread adoption of that sort of industrial scale idiocy.
People who rarely set foot outside Manhattan have no understanding of how far apart things are out here in Deplorable-land. Some little electricity power piece of shit is about as useful to me in my daily life as a trepanation hole. I want to be able to travel large distances on a single tank, be able to easily refuel in a short period of time and haul a lot of stuff/people to my destination. Stupid little glorified Vespas might make perfect sense to soy boys zipping around Brooklyn, but they are completely useless to me.
While I don’t know how accurate your characterization of New York City life is, I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that our major urban areas should be governed like city-states to a greater extent. While they already exercise considerable autonomy, the reciprocal separation from governing the surrounding areas is not there. Just because a particular place constitutes a substantial proportion of a state or much larger region’s population does not mean it should have deterministic control over that place’s governance. It is reminiscent of the French Revolution, where all the cities, but especially Paris, decided they knew best for everybody else, too. Well, that didn’t turn out so well. Decentralized government, at a deeper level even than traditional state-oriented federalism, is the real solution to the political problems currently going on. You and your neighbors get a say over how you are governed, that is self-determination. But you don’t get (much) of a say in how people you don’t like who don’t live near you get governed, because they too should enjoy self-determination.
+a zillion
I’m giggling at the thought of progs freezing to death as they attempt to commute to work on their hoverboards in January. Some of them would simply head on south like some bearded hipster Mary Celeste before they unthawed somewhere around Des Moines. The cops would be perplexed by all the dead hipsters that would be littering their roads.
We all know you’re not a real adult until you have a mistress.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/06/22/cities-most-ashley-madison-accounts-cheating-husbands/720864002/
BTW, all this is sponsored content by Ashley Madison. These kind of write-ups have been popping up in milquetoast publications like USA Today for the past few months; they always reference the site by name and always talk about how the women joining the site are genuine and looking to get drilled no strings attached.
…no strings attached.
Yeah, right.
Well, there’s the one, but that’s downtime anyway.
Except Ashley Madison had already been caught generating fake female profiles.
Yeah, I think this is damage control on their part.
No thanks. The one woman I have takes all of my time and energy.
And-
*What has become popular out here is the use of side by side all terrain vehicles for short hops around town. It occurred to me one day that you could buy a really nice Meyers Manx for about a third of what those things cost.
!!!!!!!
Today’s trendiest Little Vehicles, the shared e-scooters, have solved the cost problem, but they could still be taken down by the nerd factor and the fact that they’re not really at home on either the streets or the sidewalks. But these services also have a huge advantage, in that they can follow in the wake of America’s remarkably successful docked bikeshare systems, and in Ofo and Mobike, the Chinese dockless bikeshare pioneers.
Wut?
It’s typical government metrics. Success is measured in money spent.
In the ’90s, St. Paul launched the Yellow Bike Coalition. It put a bunch of bikes around town that were free to use. I’m not going to sugar coat the news, but it didn’t go well. Within 3 years they had all been stolen and closed down.
Now we have those bike rental kiosks and I keep hearing how great they are doing, but haven’t ever looked into the numbers.
Local rental says they’re doing gangbusters. Exceeding all expectations. Thing is I’ve only see one of those bikes being used.
The pricing doesn’t make sense. It’s $1 for the first 15 minutes, then 10 cents a minutes so $4.50 for the rest of the first hour and $6 for each additional hour. What kind of pricing scheme encourages you not to use it?
Math is hard.
Finally, Ernest claims, “the personal impact of learning mathematics on learners’ thinking and life chances can be negative for a minority of less successful students, as well as potentially harmful for successful students.” Ernest continues to explain that math is often viewed as “masculine,” and that that can essentially make it difficult for women to deal with learning it.
Bless his heart.
We shouldn’t make anyone do anything that is difficult, because they might fail and it would traumatize them. Plus, patriarchy.