That’s ol’ Slippin Jimmy for you, ever hear about that time in Chicago with the sunroof? Good stuff

I agree and accept your judgment. I’m not optimistic about the future of this country; at this point my only hope is that we don’t take the rest of the world down with us.

I’m sure he was a swell guy, a lot of fun at barbecues, dog lover and good with kids yada yada. Plenty of awful folks in history are like that. I hear Hitler was a fun guy who liked dogs and kids too.

…well not ALL kids but still

You’re ok with little planes flying through hyperspace but draw the line at space hacking, lol

On the contrary, Luke Skywalker taking a lucky shot

Man that’s like the ONE THING that I totally give star wars a pass for. It wasn’t a lucky shot. The design flaw was there, yes, but the targeting computer was never going to work. Red leader had a lock and it still didn’t work. Wedge Antilles, the best non-Jedi starfighter pilot in the galaxy, expressed strong doubt at least two or three times. Luke had to use the force to destroy it, there was no other way. If you can suspend your disbelief to accept the existence of the force, it makes perfect sense in the context of the story. Fucking masterpiece!

Ever seen Primer? Equal and opposite to that, easily the most confusing movie I’ve ever seen and they don’t spoon feed you anything, lol

That’s why I always have my criminal conspiracy meetings at Starbucks or Wendy’s.

The pseudo-realism in those batman movies and comic book movies in general is a huge part of why I detest them. It’s like an uncanny gap or something. Comic book characters are inherently ridiculous and absurd so I can’t take them seriously. They ask me to suspend too much disbelief.

One specific example from the batman movies is at the end of one of them, I forget which, I think a few hundred cops charge a bunch of guys with machine guns or something? And I remember thinking in the theater they are about to get mowed down World War I style. But somehow they win, they all live, and the streets aren’t flowing with a river of blood. You want me to take them seriously, while having absurd characters and situations, and then you put them in situations where they absolutely should be massacred…I just…I’m out…

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-announces-sweeping-effort-to-restore-fairness-to-tax-system-with-inflation-reduction-act-funding-new-compliance-efforts

The complex structures and tax issues present in large partnerships require a focused approach to best identify the highest risk issues and apply resources accordingly. In 2021, the IRS launched the first stage of its Large Partnership Compliance (LPC) program with examinations of some of the largest and most complex partnership returns in the filing population. The IRS is now expanding the LPC program to additional large partnerships…By the end of the month, the IRS will open examinations of 75 of the largest partnerships in the U.S. that represent a cross section of industries including hedge funds, real estate investment partnerships, publicly traded partnerships, large law firms and other industries. On average, these partnerships each have more than $10 billion in assets.

Believe me when I tell you a partnership with $10b assets is insane. Auditing that is extremely labor intensive and requires a ton of highly specialized skills and that all requires resources.

There’s really nothing left to argue here so please just take this at face value and move on.

Well the market disagrees with you. And as long as people are forking over $1 million for a starter home and all other equities and commodities are at all time highs, prices won’t budge.

Yeah aka market correction to reach equilibrium. Nothing to see here, move along, move along.

Right, well, anyway, the IRS budget just got a huge increase under the Biden administration new budget. They’re finally hiring a ton of new agents and updating their ancient tech etc. The R party fought tooth and nail against this and there’s an active smear campaign to make the average person afraid they’re coming after you. R’s managed to reduce the budget increase which is going to reduce the IRS ability to go after the whales, as you were griping about in your original post.

It’s super easy to implement, comply, and enforce this. Like almost automated levels of easy. It’s significantly more complex and requires tons of resources and expertise to go after the whales as you say. Resources they just don’t have. Resources that might be wasted if/when it turns out the taxpayer is fully compliant within reason.

It’s not about double standards, it’s purely logistics and resources - at least on the IRS side. Congress is responsible for their funding, or lack thereof, and it doesn’t take long to figure out who’s responsible for the lack of it. So I’d encourage you to focus your ire on the response political party, not the IRS itself.

All that happened here is they lowered the reporting threshold to cast a wider net and force people to reported income they otherwise could have just not mentioned. It’s not quite like flipping a switch but it’s relatively easy to comply with, and relatively easy to enforce. “Fixing taxes” is significantly more complicated, to say the least.

He’s one of the GOATs, how could they possibly hate him?

I switched to iced coffee years ago for precisely this reason and never looked back. I’d rather have watered down coffee than sit there for half an hour waiting for it to cool. I have an ice tray for big cubes that don’t melt as fast, so I freeze coffee in them. That way I don’t water down my coffee at home and it’s perfect.

Pi can be rounded. It’s infamously difficult to compute externalities in any meaningful sense. Even more difficult to implement a fair and actionable policy for it. You can google “accounting for externalities” and read a bunch f articles and academic papers on the subject, which has been debated for decades.

Beyond fines for dumping chemicals in rivers, and carbon taxes, etc, stronger EPA, etc, I don’t really have any good ideas for codifying a real actual plan into law. Probably easier to raise corporate tax rates up a few points from 21% to whatever and use it to fund green energy and cleanup projects etc, rather than change accounting methods to try and capture the costs that way.

Regarding commuting specifically I meant how do you determine the cost of each extra pound of co2 in the atmosphere. It’s inherently incalculable because the effects of climate change are insanely complex. That’s my point about externalities. How do you price the value of standing in an open meadow at dusk?

You’re hardcore. I just can’t do that though. I’m in good shape but I sweat a LOT and can’t show up at the office drenched. It would ruin my day.

Modern accounting techniques are amazing and super effective, barely unchanged since their codification in the 1490s by an Italian scholar named Luca Pacioli. The biggest weakness of accounting though is its inability to capture externalities. How does one company record the cost of their employees commute? How do you even begin to calculate that? How do you measure the cost of extra leukemia cases in a town ten years after a train derails nearby? How do you record that in your books? How do you calculate and record the distress these huge noisy shipping vessels cause whales? It’s just so subjective and impractical.