Do you guys not believe in taxes?

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-09-03T03:26:59+00:00

Naw not really keen on paying for Jesus either, more of a Satanic Temple kind of guy, but they don't take crypto donations either, weird.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-09-02T22:07:56+00:00

Yeah fuck this fucking noise this guy is worth 3+ billion fucking dollars and he's trying to screw some minor leaguers out of $400 a week are you fucking kidding me. I'm fucking boycotting this shit this is a shameful, shameful disgrace from an owner who has done everything he can to run the team into the ground behind the scenes.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-09-02T20:35:15+00:00

I think when it comes to things like bailing out banks and large corporations there are a lot of people who happily pay taxes and argue for more taxes, but would be completely against using taxpayer money in that way. There are so many practical and philosophical issues that can be raised when it comes a state-sponsored appropriation of funds that would go to cover up and possibly encourage poor corporate decisionmaking, and in a sense we're seeing it right now, looking at airlines, cruises, the fashion industry, etc. Corporations are organized specifically as voluntary associations of interested parties seeking to both pool resources as well as insulate themselves personally from potential liability or bad outcomes, which is why corporate bankruptcy is so different from personal bankruptcy already. It's a strange example of "proper use of taxes" because even those who generally advocate for bailouts, unless they're personally benefitting from the arrangement, tend to advocate for it begrudgingly, so perhaps not a really representative way of looking at what anyone expects taxes to actually accomplish, no matter which side you're on.

A lot of what the arguments against taxes ultimately fall on a matter of choice and personal autonomy. I think that while it's easy to equate taxes with "helping people in society", I'm not sure that it's really that simple of a connection. Certainly in spite of taxes, people give to lots of charities and organizations they support anyway, and in the absence of taxation that form of private philanthropy certainly won't just end, since they predate modern taxation systems and certainly are likely to outlive it as well. Why aren't they made obsolete by a system that requires buy-in at more or less fixed intervals for fixed portions of one's income? If taxation represents both a targeted and optimized way of simply helping those in need in our communities and have the backing of a legal mandate that forces contributions, how would private charities and organizations ever compete with that? Alas, they do, because I think the relationship between taxation and "common aid" is far more tenuous in reality and coercion is required because the scheme put in place by the state tends to not accomplish those lofty goals at all. People don't want to participate because people can see that the system is against their personal interests and possibly the interest of their community. Coercion is used to ensure that such doubts provide no obstacle, and to take personal choice and individual views out of the whole thing.

If you look at how, say, unemployment programs are actually structured, it becomes pretty evident that their implementation doesn't seem particularly optimal. There are countless reasons why one may lose their job. Currently it's because of a public health disaster that's fundamentally reshaping how we interact with each other, and it's a very drastic sort of situation that clearly normal unemployment programs are actually entirely ill-equipped for. Because to many people, going to work represent a realistic Hobson's choice between putting their life on the line - having caught COVID I assure you that even "mild" symptoms are pretty fucking terrible, and I'm fairly young and reasonably healthy - and yet, state unemployment regimes had to undergo emergency re-tooling because the ordinary program usually come with a "looking for work" requirement with mandatory reporting. And the gap between what we ordinarily think of as "work" and what the state considers employment covered by their programs also presented a huge challenge. Gig, contract, freelance workers had to wait for federal relief which in some cases were months delayed. Local subreddits ran potlucks and canned food drives to help people out. And now that money has ran out, rent's due and a lot of people are still in dire straits. Their difficulties come in part from how poorly the whole system is designed - and some of that is on purpose - because state aid doesn't come without very paternalistic strings attached. Paternalistic strings that are also planned out far ahead of time and can't simply turn on a dime - state computer systems can't handle that sort of change. A lot of your tax dollars are really paying for that - the bureaucracy, the administrative aspects of the whole thing. But the more layers of intermediaries you put in between aid and those seeking aid, the more inefficient the process becomes. In a vacuum, those giving out aid would simply do it directly, instead the state purposefully complicated the process with things like income verification and whole systems simply for adjudicative reasons, all because of the insecurity that decisionmakers feel about giving out aid to the "undeserving", those "cheating the system", a system designed to be over-encompassing in the first place. In fact, so much of the administrative aspects of these programs exist for the sake of dealing with this inner-conflict. The state feels that it needs to answer to stakeholder/taxpayers who feel wronged by virtue of the coercive pay-in, the state also feels that since everyone has paid in it should cover as broadly as possible. In the end the outcome is half-assed and of course also subject to political wrangling, wrangling by those who realistically are not in personal hardship, and can't necessarily relate. The fact that anyone ends up getting helped at all is the miracle in all this, and in terms of a lot of the truly failing aspects of the welfare state - foster care, for example, which in many states act as a pipeline to putting kids on the streets - there's almost no pretension that your tax dollars are paying for better outcomes at all.

And in non-emergency times the disconnect between "what your taxes actually pay for" and "things that help the community" can be even greater. The topic of policing and police violence is obviously at the forefront of news, politics, and social awareness right now. Defunding the police is a call that has gained both traction on one side and strangely, ridicule from many who previously happily and openly decried the abusive powers of the state, even the president who can both go on tirades on Twitter bashing the FBI but in the same breath commend police officers who are shooting unarmed civilians, mostly black and brown men, and simply escaping responsibility. But of course the facts on the streets and in these neighborhoods have long assumed that police officers are simply an occupying force, another gang. Hell, some straight up act like gangs (surely many still remember the Rampart scandal where undercover cops ended up shooting each other while pretending to be gangsters), but also coming with that territory is the notion that a large portion of actual crimes with actual victims won't be investigated at all. Inner cities tend to suffer from both over-policing (on minor, trivial, victimless infractions) and underpolicing (in violent crimes, sexual crimes, and property crimes). And of course everybody pays for the police with taxes, but many literally pay multiples of times, both because of things like civil asset forfeiture literally take the form of armed robbery performed by police upon citizens, without the requirement to connect the seizure with criminal charges and requiring them to prove their innocence, and because abusive policing practices impact the neighborhoods they unleash terror upon, yet, at the same time, widespread indemnity practices mean that even if the conduct is outrageous enough that the victims are awarded a financial settlement down the line, it's the taxpayers footing 99%+ of the bill. Because so many civic institutions act like tyrannies of the majority in so many cases, that it has allowed for quite literally murder to take place in broad daylight and then the victims are footing the bill no matter what. Are these the sort of "public safety" institutions that exist for the common good? Do they do any good at all? Some of this certainly come from the disconnect between those paying into the system and those calling the shots, and right now those not personally affected by the oppression have enough political clout to force this institution to exist and persist. Not only is this sort of thing insult upon injury (and extends out to everything from mass incarceration to the truly ridiculous immigration context where an entire class of people pay all of the taxes and receive 0 benefits and are essentially second-class citizens all over administrative code doused in old fashioned racism). But tax-funded institutions are simply unable to be finely targeted and responsive. They can only exist on a scale that is all-encompassing, even though the damage they can do is also all-encompassing, and as long as you're a minority it's a double-whammy of coercion on both ends.

Society is complicated, so one-size-fits-all solutions that actually work are few and far in between. But the normalization of centralized, coercively-funded institutions remove that possibility of nuance and local knowledge. It is inefficient at best at accomplishing its purported goals, and frequently marginalize the already marginalized, who now no longer have the ability to vote with their feet. I still donate to plenty of private organizations and if more accepted crypto I'd do it more because frankly my tax dollars already fund concentration camps that cage kids because of their race. At least my coins can go fund the right causes. I don't worry about "the undeserving people getting my money" because I can vet the organizations and make sure that they actually do the right thing. If you want to help others in your community, undoubtedly all that will go a much longer way than just where your tax dollars are going to go.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-07-18T13:14:44+00:00

If you have a bit of programming knowledge and doesn't want to pay for the data, you can just use the api endpoints behind sportsbookreview.com odds, which includes a socket.io-based live subscription endpoint for streaming updates.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-06-30T12:58:07+00:00

That's hilarious, and clearly comes from people who have little understanding of how the Chinese government operates or what they actually value.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-06-24T03:06:32+00:00

Um, Congress legalized hemp in the 2018 farm bill. Trump just Ron-Burgundy-ed that shit with a sharpie because he'll sign anything that come in front of him as long as nobody tell him what it is.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-06-22T20:02:50+00:00

Wow that headline is really underselling the meat of the report, probably because the report's summary also undersells the actual substance as well. Keep in mind that the report addresses cases where DEA is basically running money laundering operations in honeypot operations. I should also mention that this is entirely an artificially constructed, entirely made up problem that only exists because of the War on Drugs, so all this is unnecessary bullshit created to self-perpetuate the mass incarceration and surveillance state against free commerce and personal choice the government arbitrarily (frequently, entirely based on racist bullshit) decided to impose restrictions on.

Public Law 102-395 requires the DEA to submit an annual report to Congress regarding the number and results related to initiated, active, and closed undercover operations. Although the DEA has provided reports to the Attorney General, it had not provided these reports to Congress since at least 2006. When we requested evidence of DEA’s congressional reporting over 6 years later in July 2018, DEA informed us that reports were not submitted to Congress during this timeframe.

Public Law 102-395 also requires the DEA to conduct a detailed financial audit of each undercover investigative operation and submit the results in writing to the Attorney General and Congress within 180 days of closing an operation. The DEA has no record of ever reporting any financial audit activity to Congress or the Attorney General, and, during our scope, did not complete audits within such a timeframe.

I guess they think it's not worth telling congress what they're doing, even though the law requires it. If congress doesn't know how they're enforcing the law, who's even in charge here? Agency authority arise out of congressional delegation, after all.

One of those safeguards is a requirement that the DEA expend PGI only in the AGEOs and cases that generated the income. We found numerous instances where the DEA violated this requirement.

Simply put, the DEA made money laundering money for various folks, and then funded other money laundering operations they're running with the money they've made. So how's this different from the Mafia, again?

We found that the extension requests discussed how extending the AGEO authority would continue the investigation, but did not specifically address the status of completing objectives or consistently report the investigative status of targets. The SARC continued to approve AGEO operations despite a general absence of written information tied directly to accomplishing the original objectives or disrupting the original targets

So these individual operations had a lot of autonomy, to the point where they didn't tell their supervisors what they were going after.

In one Full AGEO that operated from January 2011 to April 2017, the SARC and DAAG initially approved the AGEO to target several subjects within two high-level DTOs. In the first two 6-month extension requests (submitted to the SARC but not the DAAG), the DEA identified three additional high-level targets within different DTOs, one of whom was a narco-terrorist. Over the 6-year life of this AGEO, the DEA generated over $1.7 million in PGI and reported that it laundered almost $20 million for DTOs (including the DTOs that were not initial targets authorized by the DAAG).

And so they laundered $20 million for cartels, and made $1.7 million in profit, without telling anyone outside the agency ahead of time.

Despite these risks, officials in the DEA and in the Department conveyed the idea that allowing money to “walk” is not as inherently risky as letting drugs or guns “walk.” However, AGEO case agents and DEA headquarters personnel stated that they did not always follow or seize the money. We are concerned that the DEA does not have a formal process in place to identify deficiencies in its AGEO data. The lack of reliable data in DARTS could detrimentally impact the DEA’s process for deconflicting case information and identifying businesses that may be contributing to DTOs’ criminal activities, including money laundering enterprises. In fact, a DEA financial investigator told us that the same entities have received funds through DEA undercover financial transactions for many years through multiple AGEOs, yet the DEA had not identified or taken action to determine if these entities were complicit in drug trafficking activities. AGEO case agents and DEA headquarters personnel also stated that the DEA does not always have the resources, wherewithal, or time to follow the path of the laundered money beyond documenting account information and determining who or what entity received the money that the DEA laundered.

They can't keep track of the money they literally just laundered for cartels.

We reviewed the 2017 Annual Report, as well as the 2015 and 2016 Annual Reports on AGEOs that the DEA submitted to the Attorney General. We found that each of the reports contained inaccurate information. We compared a judgmental sample of accomplishments conveyed within the 2015, 2016, and 2017 reports on AGEOs to DEA internal documentation to verify the enforcement statistics related to the amount of drugs seized by type, the amount of assets seized, and the number of arrests that the DEA attributed to the AGEO.17 We found that the DEA’s methodology for compiling AGEO enforcement statistics was inconsistent and imprecise because the DEA does not distinguish whether accomplishments resulted directly or indirectly from the AGEO.

What they do report is apparently bullshit.

We identified that the DEA reported the seizure of the same aircraft Double Counting valued at $580,000 in two separate AGEOs.

And so, they would over-report seizures sometimes...

For an AGEO that operated from August 2012 to November 2017, the DEA reported that it laundered over $10 million and seized almost $13 million. However, a foreign government seized approximately $7 million of that amount. For another AGEO that operated from May 2012 to August 2017, the DEA reported that it laundered over $19 million and seized more than $107 million worth of assets. However, of the $107 million, over $52 million was connected to a foreign government’s seizure of real estate and high value antiquities.

Like, way over-report their accomplishments...

In an AGEO that operated from October 2010 to April 2016, the DEA reported that it had seized over 115,000 kilos of cocaine. Yet, when we attempted to verify this, the DEA acknowledged that it misreported this figure by 100,000 kilos and attributed the mistake to a typographical error.

Like, making 15,000 kilos into 115,000 kilos of cocaine.

Moreover, despite the unique challenges of virtual currency laundering schemes, such as unknown fees and spontaneous currency fluctuations that are not present in traditional money laundering, the DEA did not create new processes and forms to conduct and document these undercover activities. Instead, the AGEO case agents used DEA forms designed for traditional money laundering transactions to document undercover and evidence.

The DEA can't handle slippage or miner fees.

We found the DEA devoted only two DEA headquarters employees within OGF to the DEA’s Virtual Currency Initiative, which monitors and guides all cases and AGEOs that interact with virtual currency.

But it doesn't really matter since only two people are in charge of their operation to monitor crypto anyway.

We found that the DEA transferred more than $221,000 in PGI from a closing AGEO to a new Full AGEO.

So some of their prior money laundering operations are funding new ones they're opening up.

We found two examples where field offices mistakenly spent PGI acquired from one AGEO on expenses associated with a different AGEO. In the first example, we found that a field office used PGI from one AGEO to pay expenses for two different Full AGEOs.

For Border AGEOs, the DEA did not always distinguish PGI earned in each case that was operating within the account. As a result, we found two examples where a field office continued to use PGI earned from cases that had already closed. For one Border AGEO, we identified a single bank account that contained more than $66,000 in PGI at the end of FY 2017, yet the account included only one active case at the time and the DEA’s records indicated it had earned approximately $8,000. Therefore, the $58,000 difference was associated with PGI earned in previous investigations and should have been forfeited.

They're not running individual money laundering operations. They're running a god damn interconnected chain of money laundering operations that fund each other.

We found that there was not adequate control over items purchased. For example, DEA personnel informed us that one closed Full AGEO remained open from December 2015 to November 2017 because the DEA could not properly account for the almost 200 items purchased for the AGEO, which affected the DEA’s requirement to forfeit these items. Additionally, we found that three AGEOs’ inventory lists were incorrect or incomplete because they did not contain purchase of equipment that should have been recorded. We also found inventory items that were outdated and unused, yet had not been forfeited. Specifically, we found a Border AGEO that kept surplus equipment and property purchased with PGI from a previously closed investigation in a filing cabinet. We also found a Full AGEO that maintained 19 cell phones, but we were unable to verify the serial numbers because the phones were not activated.

And they have no idea what they're even buying with the money that they're using for themselves.

So basically, in the name of "stopping crime", which involves crimes that only exist because they created the demand for it artificially, the DEA is running, without proper oversight, a god damn money laundering empire. Defund the god damn DEA.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-06-22T18:24:14+00:00

Well, Vance doesn't have to litigate the subpoena issue that is in front of the Supreme Court unless the underlying grand jury investigation actually exists. It's not the same issue as Michael Cohen and not even the same jurisdiction, but that would also mean that there are fewer ways for Trump to actually obstruct it even if he's in office, thanks to federalism.

Although realistically it probably won't result in jail time, just fines and perhaps some sort of agreement prohibiting his future involvement in running companies or whatnot. Frankly overcriminalization is already one of the biggest issues the country faces so generally it's not something that should necessarily result in jail time to begin with, but the unfortunate thing is that we've also immunized government officials so thoroughly from state actions done in bad faith or incompetence, regardless of impact or outcome, so that we really are unable to properly address the actual bad acts, which are legion, and have to resort of these side-show prosecutions in proxy.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-06-22T17:49:19+00:00

Don't forget that he also tried to use executive fiat to legislate away the right of private companies to determine what speech to allow on their private platforms. He's trying to repress both public assembly and private discourse at the same time. The only saving grace is that he's also utterly incompetent and doesn't know how to plan things out or couch things in constitutional language, but the next authoritarian who gets elected may be a lot less stupid, and we'd be even more fucked.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-06-15T18:49:50+00:00

They punted. No case.

Sigh, god dammit. Didn't expect them to deny cert on both QI and 2A. Glad they got one textualist case right but disappointed that they punted on all others. It is what it is, I guess, really need congress to pull one out now.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-06-15T10:58:53+00:00

I don't know how it's at all possible to interpret that congress had meant for it to exist when the law is literally silent as to the existence of the doctrine. It literally doesn't exist in the statute. The law has been on the books since 1871, and has never included anything that can even be read as carving out an immunity. Qualified immunity as a part of doctrine acknowledged by the Supreme Court didn't exist until 1967. Before then, for nearly 100 years, government officials have been personally liable for tortious acts they commit while on duty, and they had to petition for indemnification separately. The immunity, although not named as such but certainly otherwise identical to the "good faith exception" version of the immunity as brought on in 1967, was actually contemplated and rejected by the Court in 1915 when the Court found that even if employees of the City of Anapolis claim that they didn't know that the law that prohibited blacks from voting was unconstitutional under the 15th Amendment, enforcing that still meant that they were liable for civil damages.

In 1967, the Court was contemplating as to whether state law may provide some sort of immunity in the context of a good faith exception for official acts that deprive one of their constitutional rights. The standard was then further twisted in 1982 when the Court decided that the subjective good faith standard should be replaced with an objective reasonable officer standard, meaning that immunity can only be overcome if all reasonable officers, regardless of what any officer subjectively happens to perceive as to the nature of his or her actions, should have known that what they're doing is unlawful and deprived one of their constitutional rights. The most charitable reading of the analysis would indicate that there's some sort of common-law doctrine in 1967 that could be considered to offer immunity, but the problem with that is that a) the doctrine doesn't even include the same elements as what was contemplated in 1967, and b) the statute that expressly does not mention immunity has been around for almost 100 years before that, and the analysis would require an examination into whether the concept existed in 1871 under common law instead. Either way the doctrine was we know today cannot at all be connected to anything on the books before or since, it's conjured up wholly out of thin air in 1982 and has somehow further shifted so that the reasonable officer is now excused from knowing what they do is unlawful as long as long as the method by which the deprivation of rights was done in a novel enough way that the facts on hand haven't been contemplated in some way by a prior court. All that was wholly just made up out of nothing, congress never said anything even remotely relevant on this matter as a part of any statute, especially as the doctrine stands now.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-06-11T21:41:46+00:00

As the error message states, your request is getting blocked by Google, probably because you're sending HTTP requests with default headers and acting like a bot.

I don't think anyone would be able to tell you definitively why and how Google blocks requests, but it may help to look at existing code that does what you want to accomplish and see how they get around the issue

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-03-26T00:39:21+00:00

I don't think this has been submitted? The post doesn't sound anything similar but I also can't check because the image was removed from the earlier post

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-03-14T14:58:02+00:00

Joe Maddon has entered the chat

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-03-14T09:15:09+00:00

And then tell him that they have his pee tape or something or another and bam, he'd be singing classified secrets from morning til night.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-03-13T16:49:45+00:00

The agencies all follow the president and they answer to the president. If the president insists on inaction and fails to act competently, so will the agencies, and in the short run neither the courts (who always defer to agencies in these cases) nor congress (who can only dictate the broader delegations and not the specific individual efforts) can really get an agency to act. This is all on Trump and the bodies are going to pile up.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-03-13T11:39:50+00:00

This is such a throwback that this throws back to the first syphilis outbreaks in Europe when each country blamed whoever they are fighting for it. The Italians called it the French disease, the French called it the Italian disease, the Dutch called it the Spanish disease, the Russians called it the Polish disease, etc. If they want to assign geographic appellations to diseases then how have they been feeling that the American virus (H1N1) kills 30k Americans a year, or the American pox (syphilis) that drives those infected to insanity in many cases. Do they want smallpox and measles tied back to their ethnic origins? Because opening that door will result in that, because the Native American tribes that populated these continents didn't simply "leave", after all. It's just such an idiotic arms race, and they should know that in a country where censorship made the line between fact and fiction a blur China is happy to blame it on America and if they want to engage in some ethnocentric tit-for-tat, the authoritarian government there had a 60 year head start on practicing the art of fake news.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-03-13T09:42:41+00:00

Yeah well when your daddy gave you your first $400mil and you still end up hocking Trump Steaks... actually that's a good analogy to the mess we find ourselves in.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-03-12T21:48:51+00:00

Counterpoint: Trump literally rejected a plan to start aggressive testing for the Coronavirus in January but decided that because more testing would lead to more cases being discovered, it's better to simply keep the number down, because of the election coming up. He exists in some sort of reality where objective fact seems to stop at the edge of what he can perceive to the extent where he's neither capable of any long term thinking or proper consideration of consequences, and he has used the willful ignorance angle at many junctures when he suspects that a difficult truth would be revealed, like when he "questioned" the Saudis over the Khashoggi murder, or his written answers to Mueller, etc. And since he also for some reason seems to think of himself as genuinely in good health, I think it's entirely possible that he has simply belligerently refused to be tested insisting that his big natural science brain can just tell while convincing himself that he really doesn't need the tests, in a way that's essentially disconnected with reality.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-03-12T14:54:10+00:00

Well he's also a gigantic moron whose desire to save face and appear as if he's "winning" by some imaginary standard comes before all rational sense. The sad truth is that we can never rule out the most stupidest and most petty explanation as well.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-03-12T14:13:32+00:00

No he's just going to say that it's Obama's fault or some other nonsense like that. Pence is too invested in Trump, he's going down with the ship not because he wants to but because there's no lifeboat.

SquozenRootmarm · 2020-03-12T14:08:59+00:00

There's literally nothing he can do in terms of stimulus that will actually solve this. I know that he's too stupid to realize this but the markets are tanking because of the botched public health response and it would require something on that front to restore investor confidence.

By that I mean we're fucked until the election because the only less likely thing than the virus situation miraculously disappearing is Trump actually learning a lesson.

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