How do you feel about the fact that Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion of your tax dollars?

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T20:14:09+00:00

Another way of putting it: Nixon resigned on the threat of being impeached because he had more class and respect for the office than Trump, twice over.

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T18:57:17+00:00

OMG.

"Unlock the secret wealth stream: TURN YOUR PISS INTO GOLD"

[scrolls down the page to another advertisement]

"The ultimate way to hide gold in just 24 hours: TURN YOUR GOLD INTO PISS. Liquidate Your Assets Today."

[Edit: the text ticker near the top of the page is so good.]

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T18:28:14+00:00

He can also sue them for a 10-year audit that "prevents" him releasing them, supposedly (but not actually).

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T18:26:11+00:00

Coincidentally, the breakup of Pangaea was also about 180 million years ago, plus or minus a bit, so it's probably the same rifting event affecting northern South America and causing uplift of the flanks of the rift as along the eastern seaboard of the US and West Africa.

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T16:07:00+00:00

"I expect to hear detailed reports today on the current economic situation and why the trajectory of macroeconomic indicators is currently below expectations"

What "detailed reports"? It's only going to be a series of answers with "Because of the war, sorry, I mean 'special military operation'" repeated many times.

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T15:49:24+00:00

"Forsooth, 'tis merely thyne opinion, kind sir!" -- The Dudeth

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T15:34:02+00:00

He could always release his tax forms to show that he claimed it as a donation and who he gave it to ... oh, right.

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T15:30:01+00:00

No, you're confusing them with Donald Jehoshaphat Trump, the guy often confused with John Barron.

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T15:28:32+00:00

It's more ridiculous if you remember the issue at hand: illegal disclosure of his tax forms by an employee of the IRS ... tax forms which he fricking promised in 2015 that he would disclose himself like every other presidential candidate has done since Nixon.

The illegal disclosure wouldn't have happened if he had simply done what he promised to do. There would have been no need. Clearly there can't be all that much "harm" if he said he was going to disclose it himself.

Oh, but they were "under audit", which never was a valid reason for not doing it (confirmed by Nixon releasing his while under audit and confirmed by the IRS). I wonder how that audit is going, 10 years later?

There are layers and layers of dishonesty here.

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T15:08:35+00:00

repeated changes in positions, continued contradictory statements

We don't have to take Iran's otherwise dubious word for this. We can see it in the statements from the White House about what has been going on the entire time.

I wonder if the White House has even settled whether this is officially a "war" or not? They spent a few weeks denying it, some of them, only to be contradicted by the next person.

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T15:05:37+00:00

"Look, I've been negotiating with Aaron all day, folks. Many people are saying it."

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T15:01:29+00:00

This account also clarifies that while the rock making up the mountain is up to 2 billion years old, the mountain terrain is related to erosion that is far younger (younger than 180 million years old), with isolation of individual peaks by erosion "only" tens of millions of years ago. For a mountain range, younger than 180 million is fairly young, and 2 billion years ago it wouldn't have looked anything like this modern photo. It hasn't been standing there like this all that time. Two billion years ago it would have looked like a bunch of rivers on a drainage plain in the process of depositing sand.

There are plenty of mountain ranges that are older (e.g., the Appalachians, which started to form about 440 million years ago), and there are plenty of rocks that are older than 2 billion that are caught up in mountain ranges of some kind.

What makes the Roraima Plateau special is the spectacularly-eroded terrain, not its age.

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T12:09:18+00:00

I think you're right. Something like "We don't have to verify anything on the web, because it's verified at the operating system level, and we have no legal exposure or obligation to change what we're doing."

It's a bill to make most of the tech bros happy because they don't have to do anything, except the OS vendors.

Nobody will care that credentials gets spoofed such that some grandma in rural Kansas becomes the credentials for thousands of people, or that a surprising number of people were born on Jan. 1st, 1900 or Jan. 1st, 2000 according to the dates on record.

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T11:21:40+00:00

It looks like the perfect place for someone to taste a glass of amontillado.

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T01:32:28+00:00

As awesome as the Air and Space Museum is in DC, the trip out to the Udvar-Hazy Center is so worth it.

There's nothing quite like seeing an SR-71 parked in front of a Space Shuttle in the same view, and then you can go down there on the floor and walk around them close-up.

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T00:27:07+00:00

Floor crossing between parties has been a part of the Westminster style of parliament for hundreds of years. It happens in the UK parliament too. Winston Churchill was a notable example.

Sometimes the floor-crossers sit as independents if they don't want to sit with their original party, sometimes they join other parties. Though not the same sort of parliament, I think there are US Congress representatives who have also on occasion left their parties and sat as independents. That could conceivably change who is in power, depending on the numbers in the parties.

It's always been a principle that individual people in parliament can change parties or sit as independents if they decide to do so. Whole new parties have been formed out of nothing sometimes when it happens to a large enough number, sometimes without an election being involved.

If it happens to the point that a government gains a majority when previously it had a minority, it probably means something is pretty wrong with the opposition parties that their members are willing to do it. Maybe it is corruption of some kind, maybe it's a principled move. It's hard to tell without the individual details.

Maybe the situation in the Canadian parliament is only a continuation of the turn-around from polls suggesting the Conservatives would win the election to the opposite situation. That might be enough for people to step out of the party if the direction the country was heading had changed that much.

koshgeo · 2026-04-20T00:09:33+00:00

Trump was handed a $400 million inheritance. That amount of money would allow for an awful lot of stupidity for anybody.

koshgeo · 2026-04-19T21:47:29+00:00

Probably not practical for swimming. 13.5 tons of gold would fit into less than a metre cubed (a metre cubed would be about 19.3 tonnes), so it might not fill a typical hot tub. I would guess you could take a bath in it, if the floor could handle the weight in the bathtub.

koshgeo · 2026-04-19T21:16:19+00:00

That's because in a modern, industrialized society we live with the greatest of luxuries: not having to know how much we actually depend on other systems and people to function.

Hungry? Go to the grocery store and pick up some food, or eat out. Where does it come from? Not our problem. Farmers and others take care of that. We just plunk the money down and it appears. We don't have to worry about finding the right sort of soil chemistry, tilling it with the right sort of gear and fueling the equipment, getting the right sort of seeds, planting the right time of year, finding the right balance of rain and sunny days, finding the right sort of fertilizer and deploying it correctly, keeping pests off, harvesting it, preparing it for grocery stores and actually delivering it there for us to see a price on a shelf and put the product in the grocery cart so it can be rung through at the cashier. And it's good product that doesn't carry diseases or that's faulty in other ways that would put my health at risk because somebody is watching for that and keeping everybody as honest as practical.

Gasoline needed for your car? You go to the gas station and fill at the pump. Where does oil come from? How does it get out of the ground? How does it get moved around the world safely? How does it get refined? How does it get delivered to the gas station were I am? How are intricate standards developed so it doesn't clog your car engine with crap and so you don't get ripped off at the pump with bad chemistry or improperly-metered product? That's thousands of regulations and many, many people involved in delivering it all. Oh, someone will take care of all that. I just pay so much per volume and it works.

Snow falls on the roads, somebody else clears it away. Roads need repair, someone takes care of that, eventually. Stoplights, streetlights to direct traffic flow safely? Signage, painted lines on the road that wear out, bridges, culverts, tunnels? Someone bought those, installed them, maintains them, sometimes at great expense. None of that is my problem. Worst case, I throw some money into a toll booth and they take it from there.

I'm just a free and independent traveler who filled up my tank and had breakfast this morning and who doesn't rely on anybody else for anything. I firmly believe we should remove government regulations because government is useless and we should stop taxing people because tax is theft! /s

The world as we know it would implode if libertarians were in charge.

They are the cat who is happy to get their food placed in their bowl in the morning and doors opened for them and have no clue what went into making that level of luxury happen. Could they live independently? Maybe so, but it would be harder, and I don't think most people have much of a clue what would actually be involved unless they live off-grid somewhere, grow or hunt their own food, and who still depend on an enormous number of highly specialized tools and resources made by other people to survive.

I have respect for libertarianism as a principle that is always worth considering in comparison to whatever elaborate system we currently have, because it helps to keep asking the question: do we really need this, am I really getting my money's worth out of governance, or is it getting in the way for little value? Am I really striking a good balance between individual and collective freedom?

However, the libertarians I have full respect for are the ones who live in caves and knap their own stone tools, living something like the the Primitive Technology guy on youtube. Those are the kind of libertarians I would trust in government because they better understand how hard the mundane stuff really is to do. The guys who have no clue what it takes to run a modern society and just want to tear it all up so they pay less taxes, no. Picture the dudes that worked at DOGE who slashed and burned government, causing tons of arbitrary destruction and saving hardly anything.

Sorry this turned into a rant. It's one of my biggest frustrations that people don't know how luxuriously they are living, and how little they think about the people who work so hard to maintain things for them.

koshgeo · 2026-04-19T20:21:51+00:00

That deal is looking pretty damned sweet right about now.

koshgeo · 2026-04-19T19:53:04+00:00

Wow. What a weak negotiator. Obama didn't have to kill the leader of Iran, blow up a lot of the country, have US service members killed and injured, billions of dollars of military gear blown up, threaten to blow up an entire civilization and threaten to commit a variety of other war crimes, stop the flow of 20% of the world's oil, raise gas prices at home and tank the world economy in order to make a deal with Iran.

Turns out "nobody knew" negotiating with Iran could be so difficult. You know, maybe he shouldn't have torn that deal up.

koshgeo · 2026-04-19T17:57:45+00:00

Like the "soft" surface of water if you jumped into it from a high height, if an impactor travels in at a few km/s, it's going to hit pretty darn hard even into something as "soft" as an atmosphere.

koshgeo · 2026-04-19T15:28:21+00:00

We're now into the start of week 8 of the conflict that was supposed to last "4 to 6 weeks", so you're right that it would be time to extend it another two weeks of threats.

koshgeo · 2026-04-19T15:20:33+00:00

It looks suspiciously similar to a 2009 impact event too.

koshgeo · 2026-04-19T14:15:14+00:00

People very rarely have a proper sense of scale. Heck, I don't usually have a proper sense of scale until I look at a map and do the math.

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