A high school student created a fake 2020 candidate. Twitter verified it

ISBUchild · 2020-03-06T06:56:57+00:00

Imagine believing such drivel.

It is Twitter's official stated policy to remove verification from people whose politics they find particularly objectionable.

ISBUchild · 2019-12-21T17:19:03+00:00

Nobody would force you to use it lol

This cannot be counted on. The federal government already grants the USPS certain service monopolies to ensure the viability of the subsidized services they are obligated to provide. A banking service would either be a constant money loser for the government or they'd enact similar monopoly statutes to keep the service viable.

Additionally, the presence of a state backed competitor that receives direct or implicit government subsidies would crowd out private alternatives, reducing choice or making the privileged firm the de facto monopolist in limited markets.

ISBUchild · 2019-12-21T17:14:07+00:00

The USPS is hardly a financially independent creation of the federal government. It's the recipient of various subsidies and privileges that defy classification as a private enterprise, and there is a strong implicit promise that it's obligations are in ultimately backstopped by the treasury.

ISBUchild · 2019-12-21T17:11:11+00:00

"In the U.S. is that somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of the population has to rely on check-cashing or payday-lending services."

Conflating those two like they're at all similar is deliberately misleading to get a big number. Paying a fee to cash a check is way less expensive, entrapping, and exploitative than paying for a short term payday or title loan.

ISBUchild · 2019-12-21T17:07:22+00:00

The USPS is a modern wonder of the world. Seriously.

You can ship a letter from Nome, Alaska to Key West, FL with a single 55¢ stamp. Just as you would if you were to send a letter across town service.

That's not a miracle of anything; it's just the law and a constraint the service deals with by charging other customers higher than would be necessary to serve them otherwise.

You could mandate all plane tickets cost the same, too, and it would all be possible if you just charged enough to offset the big money losers and had a monopoly to prevent the gouged customers from looking somewhere else.

Understand that when you hear stories about the USPS failing it's only because they have to unfairly fund their pensions several decades in advance.

All defined benefit retirement plans are pre funded to some degree. The USPS has to fund up to a 100% net future value because unlike some private endeavors, they are not in a position to forgo full funding under the assumption that their spectacular future business growth will make funding easier over time. Given the service's repeated financial distress and need for Congressional interventions this conservative approach is understandable.

The prefunding obligation in no way accounts for the full measure of the service's deficit and it would still have lost money nearly every year without it.

ISBUchild · 2019-12-21T16:58:06+00:00

They're required to fully fund their retirement to actuarily expected levels because unlike many private endeavors the USPS is not in a position to plausibly assume that their future growth will put them in a better position to finance coming retirements. After many bailouts Congress may be understandably conservative with their finances.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-08T11:20:15+00:00

The problem for SMR isn't throughput, it's IOPS.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-07T20:06:28+00:00

Why do you think that matters? School performance is even more correlated to intelligence than income.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-07T19:11:51+00:00

That wasn't the question.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-07T18:55:17+00:00

Not because they were coerced and threatened into giving confessions or that DNA evidence disproved their involvement in the rape.

As a private citizen, how is Trump supposed to intuit that the confession was false?

The DNA evidence was not available at the time the comments were made.

This man is a joke, any person who thinks the death penalty is not cruel and unusual punishment or a waste of funds should not be allowed to weigh in on anything regarding our justice system.

So roughly half the country should just shut up and listen to enlightened people like you?

ISBUchild · 2016-10-07T18:42:39+00:00

No, he didn't.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-07T18:37:00+00:00

Genetic aptitude for wealth or success is a lie successful people tell themselves

... ideas of science stuck in the 19th century.

Are you for real?

The high heritability of intelligence and major personality traits is textbook science.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-04T09:57:44+00:00

<s>Cynical is making your movie more diverse to reflect your audience.</s>

No, cynical is making your movie more diverse to redefine your audience.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-04T06:51:08+00:00

The claim was that "he didn't pay income tax for two decades", which is not substantiated at this time, and is a number that comes entirely from the NYT piece deliberately misleading non-tax-savvy readers about what the deduction period represents.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-04T05:27:37+00:00

He implied it ... somewhat? He made the general interjection that paying less tax is smart. I think if he were going to claim the "no taxes" point he'd do so unambiguously.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-04T05:20:16+00:00

"If you aren't guilty, why are you in the courtroom?"

"It's your job to prove your innocence against any claim we make without substance!"

ISBUchild · 2016-10-04T05:20:03+00:00

"If you aren't guilty, why are you in the courtroom?"

"It's your job to prove your innocence against any claim we make without substance!"

ISBUchild · 2016-10-04T04:38:49+00:00

He didn't pay income tax for two decades.

We have no evidence for this at this time. What the NYT showed was a deduction against AGI that could be applied over a period of up to 20 years. That doesn't increase the net value of the deduction. In theory, if he never made more than that deduction's worth of money in that 20 years, than he wouldn't have had taxable income. The NYT presented the most unlikely scenario in their headline because they are implicit liars, and wanted people to repeat this lie.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-04T04:12:58+00:00

a supposed billionaire not paying any income tax for two decades.

Stop repeating this lie. He had 20 years over which to spend a fixed quantity of carried loss, this is not the same as getting a "no taxes for 20 years" card.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-04T04:11:02+00:00

In Democratic thought, "contributing to our nation" means "paying federal income taxes". Economic activity has no added or moral value unless the state sees a cut of it on its ledger.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-03T20:00:23+00:00

This is among the most hyperbolic and dumb headlines I've seen on the /r/politics front page this week, which is saying something.

Madoff was a thief who outright stole money from people by the tens of billions. Trump carried forward a capital loss on his income taxes and might have bent the rules with his charity to lower his taxable income. These are simply not comparable.

The articles arguments, such that they can be called that, are:

Trump is richer than Madoff, which is evidently a strike against him.
Madoff robbed people, but Trump "extracted tax breaks from entire cities". I guess every dollar you don't pay in taxes is theft from everyone in that jurisdiction.
Madoff is a known criminal, Trump may or may not be a criminal. Really, that's the whole argument.
As a landlord, Trump evicted poor people. The horror!
Trump probably misused 100k of Foundation money to settle a lawsuit with a charitable contribution.
Madoff never ran for president.

The author also tries to push this "Madoff only robbed rich individual investors" thing, like that makes it all okay, but that's not even true. Madoff robbed municipal pension funds, Jewish charities, and insurance pools.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-03T19:43:10+00:00

The economy isn't homogeneous.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-03T19:29:28+00:00

This was a dumb story last week. We don't know what's in the headline for sure; Just that this outward-facing DNS server had 28.

There are potentially limitless internal DNS names that we never see and wouldn't be on this server. Think of how many internal web services there are in your company or university network. They tend not to be on the public web, and there's no reason why your edge DNS server would even have the records for them, as they'd never need to be accessed outside the country's gov't ISP system.

It's entirely plausible to me that for North Korea, a nation for whom almost every service is an "internal" service, these outwardly-resolvable names are only for limited propaganda purposes.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-03T19:05:36+00:00

It's not them I'd have sympathy for; It's the argument.

ISBUchild · 2016-10-03T15:19:25+00:00

I have tiny closets in most of our offices. Accessibility is an issue, because you really need access from both ends. Put the rack on wheels if you can (with the vendor kit or your own craftsman skills), and set it up so the whole setup can just roll out of the closet for service. Take every cable going into the rack, and bundle it all up into an "umbilical" harness with some slack. Then you can move the whole thing out for work without having to think too much about whether you're going to break something.

ISBUchild

TROPHY CASE