I’ve avoided looking at media coverage of QPAC because fuck those ridiculous a-holes and their goddamned cult leader. But I clicked through a CNN push alert earlier today and was pleasantly surprised at the tone of this piece by Stephen Collinson.
Collinson framed the story correctly, i.e., the ongoing threat the Persimmon Pustule poses to democracy. He called lies “lies.” And he pointed out that outlets like Fox News and other con media that carried the lie-fest live were irresponsibly helping the Pumpkin-Head ImPotentate further radicalize cultists who have already demonstrated a propensity for violence.
We’re awfully critical of the Beltway press around here, and they often deserve it. But CNN did evolve during the stump error. Not as quickly as the crisis demanded and not always in the most helpful ways, IMO. But here’s some credit where it’s due.
In other news, WaPo is reporting that senior Dems are abandoning the Plan B for a $15 minimum wage that was floated last week, i.e., to use tax penalties to force big companies to raise the current starvation wages:
Senior Democrats are abandoning a backup plan to increase the minimum wage through a corporate tax penalty, after encountering numerous practical and political challenges in drafting their proposal over the weekend, according to two people familiar with the internal deliberations…
Democrats have said they will seek to include the $15 minimum-wage proposal in a separate legislative package to be advanced later in Biden’s administration. It remained unclear how they would do so or how they would overcome the obstacles that prevented them from securing the provision in the current stimulus plan.
It sounds like it’s mostly a timing issue — the rescue package needs to be passed quickly before unemployment benefits run out this month. In a TV appearance over the weekend, Press Sec Psaki said Biden remains committed to raising the minimum wage, and they’ll be working on it in the coming days and weeks. Good.
In other other news, valued commenter Ksmiami recently reached out with an idea for body-slamming Republicans in upcoming elections. It revolves around a little-remarked-on (that I heard of, anyway) provision in the Turnip tax cuts of 2017, in which home office deductions for most W-2 employees were eliminated. Via FedWeek:
The IRS has issued a statement on an issue that has been raised by many federal employees who—like many others in the private sector—have been teleworking full-time for months: whether they can claim a home office deduction when they file their taxes next year for 2020 income.
In sum, the answer was no, regarding work related to a salaried federal position—but maybe, related to side income such as self-employment income. It says:
“The home office deduction is available to qualifying self-employed taxpayers, independent contractors and those working in the gig economy. However, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act suspended the business use of home deduction from 2018 through 2025 for employees. Employees who receive a paycheck or a W-2 exclusively from an employer are not eligible for the deduction, even if they are currently working from home.”
This might come as a nasty surprise to millions of office workers who’ve incurred business expenses while telecommuting due to the pandemic. Ksmiami speculates that Democrats could use the anti-worker change the Turnip admin embedded in the tax code against Republicans. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Open thread.
OSCAR’S billion dollar bet
Mathguy
“Persimmon Pustule” FTW. I had not seen that one before.
MagdaInBlack
I’m dropping “trumples” and going with “turnip” from now on.
Denali
A popular local one is “fecal maggot.” Seems appropriate.
Baud
With respect to the tax issue, the GOP’s strategy will be to concede on the popular tax breaks but refuse to vote for anything else the Dems might include in them. Keeps up the “both sides” and “Congress is disfunctional” propaganda.
Ksmiami
@Baud: only if we don’t take the framing advantage…
Baud
@Ksmiami: What does that mean?
Gin & Tonic
Sixth!
ETA: Damn!
Baud
Frankensteinbeck
It’s bloody CPAC. It’s always a freakshow of the most asshole end of Republicanism, focused on the buzzwords of the moment that they think will cause liberal tears.
germy
This twitter thread does a deeper examination of Madison Cawthorn’s alma mater. After reading it, I wonder how he can call himself a “college” graduate:
Emerald
On the $15, Lawrence O’Donnell last week said that they’d pass it this time the same way they passed it last time: they’ll stick into some must-pass legislation like the defense appropriations bill. Neoprog and media tears about how horribly the Dems are in disarray over the issue notwithstanding. Ignore ’em.
Wapiti
Regarding the minimum wage: If the (eventual) bill had a ramp up to $15, but allowed state governors to request a waiver to cap the minimum when it hit 70% of the median state wage (which means $11 minimum for W.VA, iirc), could we get the votes? It would put the onus of rejecting the $15 on the governors, which in many/most cases would be Repubs.
(The 70% number is apparently the point where job losses downside gets worse than the wage increase upside?)
phdesmond
if the democrats propose a tax bill soon, could they not include the $15 minimum wage? reframed so as to clearly conform to senate restrictions on the 51-vote majority?
Baud
@phdesmond:
There’s no way to pass a conventional minimum wage increase under reconciliation. We’d need to either get rid of hr filibuster or get 10 GOP votes for the bill.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
This time about a year ago, you (Betty) did a piece on CNN’s coverage of Hair Furor’s speech about the plague. Dana Bash made some blatherings about him sounding presidential, etc. You correctly called her a godawful hack.
Which she was/is. Like damn near all of em (Borger, Acosta, Tapper, etc) if we’re looking purely at CNN.
But the past year has been, as you point out, damn near earth shattering in terms of CNN’s coverage and more importantly, their wording. Watching Cooper, Cuomo and Lemon every night has been eye opening. They’re more Olbermann than Olbermann was back on ‘Countdown’.
It really started with the chryon writers who clearly got the okay from the editor bosses. Then it percolated to many of the rest. When I heard Bash say “shit show” after the debate, I thought the world had turned upside down. And Acosta’s been a more subtle but more substantive eye opener in the last year.
They still have problems like having Rick Santorum on.
germy
germy
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Even Major Garrett, over a CBS… he was starting to sound like a balloon-juice commenter during the last days of the trump administration, and well into the transition.
germy
Cameron
For a long time I bought into the idea that RWNJs are delusional. I no longer believe that. They understand exactly what they want, and that’s authoritarian/fascist government. Just reading about the CPAC shenanigans convinced me once and for all. We’re in a bad place in this country, though it’s too early to throw in the towel.
Baud
Second x 10¹.
laura
@germy: I’d sure like to see the US require public education for all k-12 children, but I’d settle for no public money used for private or religious schools.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Baud is mathy
Second x 10¹ + secon
P.S. I heard you bought a new computer, was it a laptop, what did you get?
germy
@laura:
I agree.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Before I give somebody like Bash to much credit:
Back to hackdom
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Technically classified as a desktop, but it’s an all in one. All the components except the wireless keyboard and mouse are built into the monitor, so it’s semi-portable. My old laptop was slowing down to a crawl, which made working on it frustrating.
trollhattan
@laura:
Yup. One thing I learned reading a Grant biography was how adament he was about not funding parochial schools.
“I support U.S. Grant on this issue!”
Technocrat
Decades ago, I had a debate with a friend about the apparently ubiquitous Republican appetite for sheer conquest, as opposed to governing. His rebuttal – and I agreed at the time – was the statistical unliklihood of a population evently distributed across two parties, where only *one* of them deviates significantly from normalcy.
Much later I realized that political affiliation is a self-selecting sample. People aren’t randomly assigned an “R” or “D”, those memberships are an expression of values. The behavior of the GOP is a reflection of who it’s members are, not the other way round. QPAC (I love that) is simply a place for terrible people to congregate and celebrate their terribleness.
I think the media may be starting to wrestle with a similar epiphany.
BTW, “Pumpkin-Head ImPotentate” is just ::chef’s kiss::
Another Scott
@Baud: Thanks for the pointer. The PDF is only 15 pages.
Page 3 is confusing to me. Is she able to make the old problem of – the federal government only being able to tax beyond excise taxes because of the income tax amendment – by putting this under the PPACA or something? Why is health insurance mentioned?
I wish the bill were more explicit about how it addresses that issue of “legality”.
I also wish that it were more explicit about the rules for valuation, etc., (though it does mention sensible caveats) as you know that’s there the devils lie in wait…
Cheers,
Scott.
Subcommandante Yakbreath
@germy: Marcus Aurelius FTW; my favorite Stoic. Anybody remember Walter Black’s Classics Club? I got a fair number of them in high school, but the Meditations was the only one I read from cover to cover.
cain
@Gin & Tonic:
Timing is everything – ;)
Ruviana
@germy: Leaving aside whether PHC is an actual college, Cawthorne only says he’s a graduate because he’s an inveterate liar. He dropped out after one semester with a D average.
Central Planning
In the OP:
I’ve had a home office when self-employed, and currently work from home since my local bigco office no longer exists.
I have never taken a home office deduction. My account claimed it was basically an invitation for an audit and I didn’t want to risk it. I don’t believe the savings was worth the paperwork and documentation you would have to save
SiubhanDuinne
@germy:
“Patrick Henry” was the name of the fictional university in Atlas Shrugged, where John Galt and his two best buds went to school.
I doubt the naming of Madison Cawthorn’s alma mater is a coincidence.
geg6
That home office deduction cut is exactly why I decided that I would not use my own computer to work from home and made the University provide one. It’s also why I decided not to buy a printer, even though I am required to have a lot of hard copies on hand for the VA and some other agencies that require them. I’m not buying a printer and new computer to not be able to write them off since I would be using them exclusively for work. Fuck that shit.
Hungry Joe
I’ve commented on my out-there, SuperBernieBro relatives before, but Biden’s taking office seems to have driven them even further around the bend, and I may have found a primary source of their madness:
Are any of you familiar with the far-far-left YouTube ranter Jimmy Dore? They mention him occasionally, so I watched a few minutes. It seemed like parody at first, but the guy is serous. I suspect it’s from him that they got their current mantras: Kamala Harris is a cop who will always sell us out; Elizabeth Warren is a corporate stooge and a war criminal (she votes to approve budgets, which include our War Machine); Obama is a war criminal (budgets, drone strikes); and Biden, who could simply declare that everyone is eligible for Medicaid (?) and therefore provide universal health care, but won’t, is therefore a monster. Oh, and he’s also continuing to keep children in cages because … he’s a monster. And he could have just issued $2000 checks, but he won’t because he’s a lying … you guessed it: monster.
Ms. Hungry Joe semi-suspects that Dore and his ilk are right-wing plants or Russian useful idiots. I dunno. But they sure have poisoned our family.
wenchacha
@germy: Major Garrett was who I noticed, too. I don’t recall which programming. But yeah, he didn’t hold back. At least he had no chills when Biden landed, or didn’t say it.
germy
@Ruviana:
He must have cut all his classes.
James E Powell
Why does Gillibrand get blamed for Franken resigning? I don’t remember the exact sequence of events, but I went back and looked and if she was the first, it wasn’t by much.
Baud
@Hungry Joe:
I never considered the possibility of an original source for that sort of thing. I always figured it evolved organically, except where the Russians were behind it.
Bill Arnold
@Hungry Joe:
Objectively, they are Republicans, because they help to elect Republicans and damage the Democratic Party, and rarely have anything negative to say about Republicans. Since Republicans are dominated by White Christian Supremacists, they are also White Christian Supremacists.
If they don’t like hearing that, they should consider some heavy introspection.
Hungry Joe
@Baud: Yeah, I don’t think Dore is THE original source — just, perhaps, my relatives’. Was just wondering if anyone here is familiar with him, and how great his influence might be.
Cameron
@Hungry Joe: I’m sort of a Bernie guy, and I find Dore a bit….odd, I guess would be the best I could say. The weird smug certainty reminds me of wingnuts.
piratedan
@James E Powell: i think it was because she was first and she was loud, as if she found a true cause with the Me Too movement. I know that she has other passions but they are rarely messaged as succinctly; so that she has a national imprint, unlike Warren or Sanders.
Then when the Me Too movement was corrupted by those looking to either subvert or take advantage of the process… it just kind of quietly faded away.
Because she didn’t have any other standout positions or had the media chops to move from this, it feels like her soapbox was taken away. It’s not as if the majority of the Dem caucus didn’t have a “cut bait” moment when it came to Al. Perhaps if it all comes back to how it would have been handled in the media once the narrative was set, namely if you’re explaining, you’re losing.
Delk
I wouldn’t be surprised if Cawthorn could walk. Liars gotta lie.
Betty Cracker
@Hungry Joe: I know enough about his views to not be interested in hearing anything else from him (e.g., a Trump win in 2016 would be better for progressive causes than a Clinton win, etc.). I don’t know how widespread his influence is. I believe he was (and maybe still is) a Young Turks douche-canoe.
Hungry Joe
@Bill Arnold: You got that exactly right: They never trash Republicans. When questioned about this, they say that Republicans are at least open about being fascists, while Democrats are sneaky — they get us to vote for them, then sell us out.
They voted for Jill Stein (in a swing state!) in ‘16, and voted for some obscure party this time. Because there’s no substantive difference between Trump and Biden. I could scream. (In fact, I do scream.)
cmorenc
@Baud:
we already have a publicly accepted version of the wealth tax in the estate tax, which doesnt have the problem of seeming to penalize entrepreneurial effort, since the entrepreneur in question is by definition deceased and cannot be any further entrepreneurial – the gop significantly hollowed it out with the tax cuts of 2017.
The problem with a wealth tax on the living is that a majority of the electorate enjoys the possibility they could become rich while alive, however small that possibility actually is via work or winning the lottery. Not as much sympathy for the dead unless they are your rich uncle who cut you into their will
rikyrah
This is the thread I read about Missouri Vaccination sites ??
https://twitter.com/LynzforCongress/status/1365798826876018692?s=20
Steeplejack (phone)
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Also, to their credit, CNN did not show the Former Guy’s CPAC speech live.
PJ
@James E Powell: She was the main Senator pushing for it. Once she came out demanding his resignation (because, according to her, she was tired of having to answer questions about Franken), a lot of other Senators fell in line (including some, like Warren, who later said they regretted it). But all the reporting indicated Gillibrand was the instigator.
germy
whomever
@Hungry Joe: I’ve noticed an explosion of these sorts of posts after the recent Syria strike (apparently Biden is the worst warmonger in American history), and yeah, the Russians care a lot about their warm water port in Tartus so…
Once I noticed the suspiciously Russian tilt of Naked Capitalism (eg the republishing of some very strange posts about Mother Jones from weird Russian blogs) I couldn’t help notice the “ha ha ha all of reporting on Syria is lies” theme, such as “well obviously the White Helmets are just propaganda” I mean I know nothing about the White Helmets beyond what I’ve read but “they” seemed suspiciously eager to belittle them (and yes somehow never mentioned Assad). I think that was really when I realized that the Nihilistic “everything is lies” approach is actually a very useful cover for dictators…
Immanentize
@James E Powell: IIRC she claimed the pole position of first to ask Franken to go. It was part of her self-develped identity (First in the Fight) for her run for President (remember that?). Her reputation as a leader regarding the “believe the women” part of harassment got a bit tarnished when she rather badly handled a pretty clear case of harassment in her own office during the campaign.
I like Gillibrand, but I do think she saw an opening, a “lane” if you will, in the primary and got all tripped up on the chalk lines in that lane.
Hildebrand
Really OT – I mean really OT: We had to replace a toilet. Yipee. That was fun. The new toilet is taller and the lid doesn’t fit under the corian shelf that didn’t want ripped out or cut (it is attached from one wall to the next – and wraps completely around the sink – yes, I hate the way whomever ‘updated’ this bathroom years ago decided to do this). Why not go with a model similar to what was there? Because the one they had in there was a high-end luxury elongated thing that would have cost me a mortgage payment to replace – and the bargain toilet makers didn’t have anything comparable.
So – a question – is there such a thing as a very low profile toilet tank lid? Something that can be slid on top and look decent?
Yep – really important stuff today.
neldob
A minimum basic income seems better to me. It would affect small businesses less, and maybe could be done through reconciliation. Jobs may be scarce, it would help lower crime and help unemployed families. There are probably more reasons.
Taken4Granite
@Delk: Obligatory: Mein Führer! I can walk!
Zelma
@piratedan:
I was really upset with what happened to Franken but I think Gillibrand felt she had to be up front. She has/had been one of the senators pushing hardest against sexual harassment in the military. It was sort of her issue.
I was convinced that the Franken thing was clearly a set-up. But I also guess that, given his background and age, he might have been a bit handsy at times. Like Joe, frankly.
Cameron
Smuggled out from Orlando, the end of the CPAC 2021 conference:
https://youtu.be/o6Tmn28OyIE
Immanentize
@cmorenc: I am completely an Andrew Carnegie follower when it comes to inheritance taxation:
He believed in 100% taxation upon death except for allowing limited amounts for education and the welfare of dependants. His theory was that it was a person’s duty to use their wealth for the betterment of society throughout life and if any was left over, it should be the government’s to use.
WhatsMyNym
@rikyrah: My sibling & spouse live in the rural middle area of MO, they got shots at a nearby pharmacy (about 30 miles away). So did their friends, all over 65.
trollhattan
@whomever:
I heard an unchalleged interview of an MP on BBC who declared “with 99% certainty” that the only way the Syrian gas attacks occurred was if the White Helmets had created gas chambers, gassed people then scattered them around the scene.
No other explanation made sense.
Boggled, was I. The very same “logic” was hauled out by some Maher guest a few weeks ago that the only possible explanation for Covid-19 was as an intentionally released bioweapon. “99% certain” was he.
I am 99% certain these tales and odds are 100% made up by 3rd parties.
Another Scott
@PJ: To be fair, her “brand” was based on going after the DoD in 2013 and 2014 (and maybe earlier) for not doing much (at all) about sexual assault and harassment there. When the Franken stuff came out in 2017, it was natural that she would be in the lead on demanding action.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Immanentize
@Hildebrand: Yes there are! And! There are restoration versions. I don’t have the links now, I’m on my phone. But google custom toilet tank lids (IIRC). I needed a top for a 100 year old toilet which was broken…. Came across all sorts of possibilities
Roger Moore
@Baud:
All-in-one computers are a nice option for people who just want a basic desktop. We have them at work, and they’re a very convenient form factor. As you said, they’re easy to move (which was very nice when we had to take work computers home at the beginning of the pandemic) and even a pretty basic desktop is more than powerful enough for most people.
I’m not a fan for my home use, but that’s because I have specific needs they don’t meet. The big one is that I want a nicer monitor than they put in all-in-one machines, which is important for photo editing. I’m also one of those weirdos who builds their own computers from components and runs Linux, so a commercial desktop is probably not in the cards for me.
Delk
Ouch! CPAC National Anthem
trollhattan
@Hildebrand:
Saran Wrap? Very thin, nearly invisible. :-)
We had something similar with a fridge that needed replacement STAT and while the specs were identical to the broken one, the new one when delivered did not fit into the cabinet space. We had to have a cabinet guy come and modify the opening and even then had to remove the trim hiding the top hinges.
Sigh, “standard” doesn’t seem to mean what it implies. Good luck!
Benw
A large part of the media only really turned on T**** after 01/06 and he was deplatformed. I haven’t seen a lot of soul searching at NYT or CNN about how they normalized monstrousness and fascism up until the inevitable violent insurrection. They are on probation for me until we see how they report on the Biden administration and the inevitable Republican shit-show in 2024.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
You can’t fix them. Ask me how I know.
Big dumb box PCs can be kept alive and also upgraded over a much longer haul. But one has to deal with the big dumb box.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
In local news I heard a stat yesterday that our county is having a real problem in getting vaccine, that we’re 53rd in PA. I suspect that has to do with the fact that we have no health department. The health department of our neighboring county is performing some of those services for us.
I don’t actually know where that number 53 came from or how “vaccine availability” is quantified.
I know geg6 at the opposite end of the state is experiencing similar things and also doesn’t have a health department. I think she’s in Washington County, which is running at 7800 per 100K residents. We’re at 6900.
In other news, yesterday was the anniversary of my last haircut, and I’m in no hurry to get one till I’m vaccinated. Mostly it’s pulled back in a ponytail but when I don’t bother with that I have kind of a Bucky Barnes thing going on. Which I’m starting to realize he couldn’t actually fight with.
catclub
@Cameron: They understand exactly what they want, and that’s authoritarian/fascist government.
Ever read “The Authoritarians”? it would agree with you.
They want a big powerful man to smite their enemies.
They don’t care if their big man does bad things, as long as he smites their enemies.
Sure Lurkalot
@Baud: That’s what I just bought. It is a lot lighter than I expected but I doubt I’ll be moving it around. It’s super fast with an SSD for programs and a regular HD for data. So far, I like it and I hope you like yours too.
Nicole
@James E Powell:
This is my own personal opinion, but I think the media is very eager to find their Hillary 2.0, and she fits the bill. Female, does not speak in a low timbre, blonde, reasonably attractive for a politician and young enough that they can dump on her for decades.
I’m not saying it’s particularly creative of the media, but she fills their desperate craving for a lady punching bag to vent their misogyny on.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Subcommandante Yakbreath:
I think that translation is a bit off. This is more accurate:
catclub
@Roger Moore:
I have installed linux on an all in one HP computer. although I think
the computer was probably a few years old in 2018 when I installed it.
Luckily we have no special hardware needs.
Ruviana
@germy: If you read the WaPo story he seemed to spend all his time taking girls on long rides and trying to put the moves on them. He hung with a group of guys who called themselves the ‘douche crew.” I was happy to see that PHC students were as dumb and obnoxious as those at secular schools.
Frank Wilhoit
@Delk: Pull a fire alarm around him and see.
piratedan
@Zelma: I have no argument at all with that, and I was brought up in an environment that coupled physical touching as a sign of affection (the non-sexual kind), as such how a hug or a hand on the shoulder could be seen and interpreted by others as being unwelcome was something I had to learn.
I think a big learn for me was that everyone has their own boundaries and you have to start from a baseline that is not your own. Took a while for me to fully understand that while “you” think you’re just being friendly, they’re tensing up in fear of just where your hands might go. Before the pandemic, I was trying to be a LOT more cognizant of that and if you judge me based on my behavior of 30 years ago, I would have failed miserably most likely by today’s standards.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Delk:
“This guy fuckin’ walks!”
Skepticat
I’ve worked online and thus from home for years, but the home-office deduction never appealed to me because you have to pay it back if/when you sell. Nevertheless, I was pretty toasted when the tax bill eliminated almost all deductions for independent contractors except in a few arcane instances.
Gravenstone
Ask them to:
Then slap them once for good measure.
Baud
@Sure Lurkalot:
Yes, thanks. I also have the SSD/HDD combo. It’s so much faster, it’s like night and day. The little delays you get with a slow computer really add a lot of stress to the work day.
Brachiator
Yes. Call them irresponsible. It is more than clear that Fox News, Sky News Australia and other right wing outlets don’t care about anything other than undermining liberal and progressive governments all over the world.
They will happily back the Orange Beast, but if he stumbles they will just move on to the next right wing stooge.
Gravenstone
@Delk: Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!
Brachiator
@Skepticat:
You only have to recapture depreciation taken on the portion of a home used for a home office.
People with a Schedule C, including most independent contractors, keep home office and related deductions.
Business expenses were only eliminated for almost all regular employees, typically those who receive a Form W2.
However, I suppose that a higher standard deduction might appear to reduce the value of some home office deductions.
SiubhanDuinne
@Delk:
Ofuckingbligatory:
https://youtu.be/A9ihKq34Ozc
Oops! Sorry, Taken4Granite @56
Betty Cracker
@piratedan: Sincere kudos to you for evolving as people asserted their boundaries instead of getting defensive about it. That takes real open-mindedness. Also, most of us would fail miserably if our every action/word from a decade or more ago was judged by today’s standards. I think that should be acknowledged more in general because it’s true.
Soprano2
This, this this 100 times this. I never thought Franken was any kind of sexual harasser, and the way it came into the news with that bullshit picture from the right-wing woman (who was totally in on the joke when the picture was taken) was extremely suspicious to me. I thought he was an older man who didn’t think there was anything wrong with what he was doing at the time he did it. There was, but he should have been given the opportunity to atone for what he did rather than be unceremoniously dumped like he was. It was wrong.
Freemark
@Hungry Joe: Never ran into any of those SuperBernieBros in real life or even DailyKos. I had seen a few on Facebook comments but thought they were most likely Russian bots. I honestly wasn’t sure they existed IRL until your comment..lol. Of course I’m from Pennsytrumpistan so finding one in the wild is highly unlikely here.
SFBayAreaGal
@Gin & Tonic: Missed It By That Much https://youtu.be/oPwrodxghrw
Soprano2
I 100% agree with this also. Things change; we have to be willing to change with them, but we cannot demonize people for acting “normally” 10 or 20 or 30 years ago unless it was doing obviously wrong things like slapping co-workers on the ass or insisting someone sleep with you to get a raise or promotion.
I suggested to one conservative friend I have who was outraged about Potato Head that perhaps people out there are deliberately ginning up these silly controversies to divide us, because in the end what a child’s toy is called is way, way down on the list of things that really matter to anyone.
Nicole
@piratedan:
That’s a valid thing you say, and I think it’s likely why the allegations about Biden’s weird behaviors around women didn’t go anywhere- because he really was just working off sexist, but at the time he was younger, considered acceptable, behaviors. He’s a gifted politician (I sometimes think he doesn’t get enough credit for just how good he really is), but he’s not that good.
In Franken’s case, the accusations (and there were 8 of them in total, besides the photograph one), were pretty specific- he was touching women in ways that in some states are legally considered sexual assault. Women know the difference.
Like you, I have a higher comfort level with physical touch than a lot of other people, but you are so, so right- we must always start from a baseline that other people are not comfortable being touched. That said, again, women know the difference. I have been hugged and patted on the shoulder by many a guy in my life; I have even had my rear touched by more than one guy I was not dating and every time I knew the difference between an affectionate but not predatory gesture, an accidental brush or a grope. Odds are, the women in your younger years knew the difference, too.
Patricia Kayden
O-o. More Brown people.
Nicole
@Soprano2: Can you cite me where Franken stated that Tweeden was in on the joke? Because it seems to me, if she had been, that would have been the first thing he would have said. What he initially said about Tweeden was:
“I certainly don’t remember the rehearsal for the skit in the same way, but I send my sincerest apologies to Leeann. As to the photo, it was clearly intended to be funny but wasn’t. I shouldn’t have done it.”
If you have quotes from him saying she was in on the “joke,” please bring them up, because the “she was in on it,” as far as I could tell at the time, is just made up by people desperate to believe Franken wouldn’t have done something that would get most people fired from their office jobs had they done it at the company party.
Mind you, I come down hard on him now, but I went down a LOT of rabbit holes when the news first came out because I was so desperate to believe it wasn’t what it seemed. So I’m not speaking as someone who was all, “I KNEW IT!” when it happened. I didn’t want it to be true. And I remember latching on to the “it was a set up” rumor and doing a lot of googling and there was nothing to it. Because it’s not true.
Roger Moore
@cmorenc:
Another big problem with a wealth tax is figuring out how much people are worth. People make it sound as if there’s some nice, objective way to determine how wealthy the ultra-rich are, but it’s really hard. Even for something that has an established market, like stocks and bonds, the price fluctuates and you have to figure out when to value it. But for more exotic assets that don’t have a market, even that isn’t possible. How do you fairly value someone’s modern art collection, family estate, or private company? We’re going to need a whole bureaucratic infrastructure to figure out just how much these people are worth.
Ruckus
@Hungry Joe:
They might just believe in fairies and wonder dust.
They might be so far left they can’t see which world they are in.
They might be so far left that they have circled around to be part of the group that thinks that government is there to take away their freedom to be assholes. Which it actually is, otherwise we’d all be carrying guns because the entire county is the wild, wild west doncha know.
They might just be ignorant assholes.
Ruckus
@germy:
He also might just be that dumb….
trollhattan
@Patricia Kayden:
I’m holding out hope for my corner taco truck.
We were promised taco trucks and by god, we shall have our taco trucks!
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
I personally go with the big dumb box, but it’s one I stuff with parts myself rather than buying one from someone else. That way I can go with premium parts as I see appropriate, like super-quiet fans.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
I’ve installed Linux on commercial computers, and you can even buy ones with Ubuntu preinstalled. But I like building my own so I can use my choice of components.
germy
SiubhanDuinne
Random thought: We can ask to be placed on “Do Not Call” lists, to shield us from scammers and telemarketers. Why can’t we request a “Do Not Mail” registry to block junk mailers and flyers, coupon-clippers, etc.?
AliceBlue
@Nicole: I’m not good at linking, but try googling “Roger Stone Franken’s time in the barrel.” Hours before LeeAnn Tweeden’s (the woman in the picture) story broke, Stone apparently knew about it, gloating about ‘Franken’s time in the barrel.”
Hildebrand
@Immanentize: My thanks, I will give them a look.
Honestly – the whole situation seems like it will be easier to rip out the ghastly corian countertop and start over than to find a low-profile toilet tank lid. And whilst I am kvetching – why do tank lids need to weigh so bloody much? It’s a lid. It doesn’t need to have the same coverage as the Chernobyl confinement dome.
SiubhanDuinne
@Patricia Kayden:
i heard his comments at the presser. If what he said about the Trump Administration’s action, policies, and decisions is even half true, there are strong allegations of criminality. Bone-shaking.
germy
More history:
artem1s
@Hungry Joe:
Dore and his ilk maybe hang overs from the Paulettes that drifted over to the Bernie camp once Ron cashed in his chips and decided to pass his grifting machine on to Rand who was roundly rejected for not being pure enough to carry on Daddy’s legacy.
SiubhanDuinne
@AliceBlue:
I’ve always wondered about that.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@James E Powell: The impression I got was Gillibrand saw Franken as her rival in the 2020 primaries, used the accusations to eliminate him and end up making herself toxic too in the process.
SFBayAreaGal
@germy: That was fascinating. Did you read the replies? That was fascinating also.
debbie
Just got back from my first shot and am treating the headache with Graeter’s Viennese Coffee and Dark Chocolate Brownie. I recommend this treatment.
Brachiator
@Immanentize:
In the Gospel of Wealth, Carnegie thought that taxation was OK, but the best thing is for the plutocrat to wisely spend the money himself on projects that will bring a benefit, such as libraries, art museums, etc.
Steeplejack (phone)
@germy:
That thread was eye-opening! Thanks for the link.
dmsilev
@debbie: I’m scheduled for my first one this weekend and will definitely keep this important bit of advice in mind.
BruceFromOhio
@Benw: This, all day, every day. Still can’t listen to NPR, and FTFNYT. Everything else gets a second chance, even a third chance.
Felanius Kootea
France’s Sarkozy found guilty of corruption and sentenced to one year in prison.
Maybe we can learn something from this.
germy
@SFBayAreaGal:
History twitter is my favorite twitter.
James E Powell
Yesterday there was a thread about schools, testing, & coronavirus.
Today I saw this article from the UK on the same subject.
The part that nearly stopped my heart:
In the US, trusting in teachers with respect to assessments is heresy.
BruceFromOhio
@SubaruDianne:
It may be too late for you now. I have five different email addresses I use to prevent exactly what you cite. One is a total throwaway I use whenever something demands an email address, and I do not want the endless stream of marketing. Once upon a time, I fancied that if I hit the Unsubscribe on enough of these unwanted messages, it would turn the tide. Alas, all it means is that the marketer has a genuine active email address to sell to another marketer.
The other four are dedicated purpose: online bill pay, newsletters from paid subscriptions, professional, and personal. And nary the twain shall meet. It’s a bit of a chore to set up, but once you get it fed and cared for it works a treat.
Martin
CA investing $2B in getting K-2 reopened by April 1. Biden’s goal is K-8 by end of April, but carving out ⅓ of that should help the state hit that goal quite a bit more easily.
Schools in counties with an infection rate below 25/100K are eligible, and must reopen by April 1 to get funding.
artem1s
The new higher standard deduction did away with a lot of paperwork for individuals. A lot of the downside was hidden in delayed higher taxes for those in that bracket that generally rely on those deductions for a higher return. I’d like to see the higher standard deduction stay but would have also like the COVID bill to provide for some relief to those workers who saw increases in expenses and utilities due to being home all day. I didn’t do too badly in that regard as most of my home office costs were offset by not eating out and buying a daily cup of fancy coffee and lunch while at work. But my pay was also frozen and probably will be until the university recovers from their COVID deficit.
artem1s
@SiubhanDuinne: Do Not Call is only, weakly enfroced for US companies. And if their call center is in located in Canada or anywhere outside the US, they can call all they want.
debbie
@dmsilev:
You won’t regret it, believe me.
Ksmiami
@Baud: basically blame the Republicans for your higher taxes in moderate suburbs…beat ppl over the head.
Martin
@James E Powell: So, a number of years ago I hired someone from the UK to run an assessment program. She was shocked that there are no review panels for assessment here in the US. In the UK instructors submit their materials and exams to a national panel of instructors for review. It’s a way of norming standards across the country. This even applies to undergraduate college courses. That an instructor could make up a final exam the day before with no review from anyone was something she couldn’t even wrap her head around.
Topclimber
@Wapiti: Is this thread still with us? If so, let me say your idea would resonate with Jack Kemp Republicans, who had the last good for all idea with indexing of tax bracket. You don’t wind up in a higher tax bracket just because of inflation.
I am not sure since I was much younger then but ex-Buffalo QB Jack was not your typical GOP racist. Black teammates protecting your lily white butt in the pocket could make one grateful for brotherhood.
James E Powell
@Nicole:
Maybe it’s because I live on the Left Coast, but I almost never hear Gillibrand’s name.
Also, I thought that the Republicans had designated AOC as their official socialist witch from hell and that the press/media unanimously agreed to go along with it.
Martin
@Roger Moore: It’s actually not that hard. I mean, yeah, it’s hard to catch everything – gold hidden in a hole in your yard will always be missed, but people worth $50M rarely resort to that kind of thing.
For stocks and bonds and the like you tie it to quarterly filing dates and average across those – or tax the lowest of the 4. For everything else, tie it to insurance value. My wife has on her laptop the replacement value of everything other than vehicles and structures for most celebrities – jewelry, paintings/art, furniture, etc. Land value is already assessed. Vehicles also need to be insured/bonded.
It’s a problem we already need to deal with as Trump will demonstrate where your declared asset value to the IRS and to insurers are wildly different. Congress needs to close that up anyway.
yellowdog
@SiubhanDuinne: If it weren’t for bulk (i. e. junk) mail, the USPS would be considerably worse off financially than it is now. It kind of subsidizes first class mail.
WaterGirl
@Patricia Kayden: I am not finding a link to that announcement online anywhere. Is there video
edit: never mind. looks like it was part of the Jen Psaki briefing.
Brachiator
@artem1s:
The Republicans should have done this early on. But the Orange Beast and many red state governors insisted that the pandemic was fake news or just a small thing that would blow over by the summer, so they did not see any need to push for changes to federal forms.
It could have been done later, but oddly enough no Republican argued for it at all. I am not sure why Democrats did not push for something.
With a number of families incurring expenses for remote learning and remote working, there was a lot of room for making some allowances for this. But an opportunity lost, for now.
To be Frank
I’ve been shocked at corporates’ willingness to let the employees provide capital
(dang it now, where is that sarcasm off button, that’s it for sarcasm for the day)
Jeffro
@Brachiator: good summation here of all the ways that trumpov and the GQP are now firmly the anti-democracy party.
And here, J-Rubs sums it up: the GQP has no values whatsoever, it’s a cult:
Another Scott
@Soprano2: I recall some story on the TV news, maybe 20 years ago, about how the (almost exclusively male) senators were so handsy with each other (touching shoulders and backs and so forth) – like they were all fraternity brothers. You can still see a lot of that today if you watch senators mulling around during votes on C-SPAN.
No excuses for Cuomo and the rest going from touching shoulders to harassment to assault, but it shows how things were in Biden’s time and how they need to realize that things about touching anyone (especially those in lower status) have changed.
It should be drilled into their heads: “Would I want Ted Cruz touching my daughter or grand-daughter this way?” until they figure it out and it become second-nature.
Cheers,
Scott.
Booger
@geg6: Can you network print to a printer in the home office? Then just have someone stick all your printouts in a box & ship them to you periodically? (serious question)
Martin
@Wapiti: I’m not sure about that 70% value. My understanding is that so long as wages don’t outrun productivity, you’re fine. That is, if worker productivity goes up 30%, wages can go up by as much as 30% without consequence. When wages outrun productivity, that’s when automation will be more aggressively pursued. Mind you, that’s almost certain to happen anyway as automation tends to be capex dominated where wages are marginal costs – and the former will almost always beat the latter.
In wage news, minimum wage for essential workers in my city is currently $19/hr – state minimum wage + $5/hr ‘hero’ wage. The world has not ended.
debbie
@geg6:
I live in a different city from where I work. I’m pissed off I still have to pay city taxes.
Another Scott
@SiubhanDuinne: The Direct Mail Marketing association has had various lists one could get on if one wanted. I’ve considered it recently, but figure that it’s probably as useful as the Do Not Call list. It only works if companies use it and respect our wishes.
https://www.dmachoice.org/index.php
It looks like one of their services costs $2 for 10 years of service.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Martin
@geg6: So, for those requirements, I have a network printer locked in my office that I can print to through a VPN. We interpreted the rules that I don’t need to have the printed copy in my physical possession, just that the university needs to in its possession. We also have our own security rules about bringing student-privacy information off campus.
We keep those documents in PDF form on a network drive, and print them to a remote printer as necessary, and that’s where they sit. I went just shy of 9 months without returning to my office and found a nice orderly stack of paper, which I removed and locked in my desk, added a new ream of paper, and shouldn’t need to return to deal with that until September.
Generally these are for audit purposes, and the paper will all end up where it should be. If we were to be audited, we’d come up with a mechanism for people to return to safely do that paper handling (realistically there will be no audit until after pandemic).
Topclimber
@Immanentize: Serendipity is all. Scott Murphy was the Dem who replaced Gillibrand in the House. He voted for Obamacare and got swept away in Tea Party tsunami.
He probably lost some of the prosperous farmers in his district for calling the “death tax” out as GOP bull. I will always remember his argument against limitless inherited wealth. “I don’t think we need an aristocracy.”
Pirated wealth at least requires talent. The inherited kind, not so much.
JWR
@Technocrat:
Me too! Because, unlike the struggle I have reading “GQP”, QPAC rolls right off the eye. ;)
@Hungry Joe:
Oh God, yes, I am. Dude’s awful! And it pissed me off when the always cash-strapped KPFK, which airs the great Ian Masters show, (Background Briefing, Monday thru Thursday, 5-6 PM), gave Dore the 5-6 PM timeslot on Friday, and I’d occasionally catch a bit of his show.
Dore would usually start out with bad impersonations of Schumer and Pelosi, followed by some really bad, “humorous” takes on the news. I can’t stomach the guy, but he’s here in SoCal, as is Gary Null, who’s one of those woo-woo people that Pacifica radio just can’t get shed of, most probably because of the big $$$ they bring in.
Brachiator
@Jeffro:
Thanks for the links. Yeah, this has been coming for some time.
Many people, including me, have noted that maybe since he time of Newt, Republicans have been insisting that the GOP is the only patriotic and democratic political party in America.
Now they have gone from hyperbole to the active assertion that anything they do is in service of restoring “real” democracy to America, “real” democracy being defined as white Christian patriarchy.
Worse, they rationalize this by insisting that they won the past presidential election and that voter suppression is actually an attempt to defend the integrity of the white vote.
In short these people are insane and cannot be reasoned with.
Martin
@cmorenc: Property taxes are a better example of a wealth tax. Less controversial than the estate tax as well.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Hungry Joe:
The emo-prog obsession with executive authority and One-Weird-Trick politics seems to only be getting worse, egged on by a lot of people who should know better.
Frankensteinbeck
For those curious, Trump got 55% in the CPAC straw poll for 2024 nomination. This is his stronghold. These are the Trumpiest of Republicans, the cream of the crazy and frothing assholes. The santorum that floats to the top of the Republican party’s offal stew. If he can’t get better than 55% after being out of power only slightly more than a month, he is indeed headed for the memory hole.
@Jeffro:
I got bad news. This has been standard Republican behavior for decades. They have relied on voter suppression for a hundred fifty years. They’ve been crazed about it at least the last twelve. Anybody remember the mainstream Republican pundit who suggested a military coup might be good when Obama won? The griping about secession? Have you seen lower level Republicans like Bevin refuse to concede and try to challenge the results of their elections, only to get beaten down like Trump?
I’m glad more people are noticing, but we’ve been in this sinkhole for a long time, now.
J R in WV
@James E Powell:
Because she is an attractive female that attracts abuse from misogynists? Just guessing.
I’m still one who thinks that whole show was a right-wing attack scam on Franken, who was an effective liberal Senator, and is also Jewish, and thus draws hatred from the anti-semites, just as Gillibrand does from misogynists.
SiubhanDuinne
@BruceFromOhio:
Oh, thanks. But I’m not talking about email, I’m talking about actual printed-on-paper stuff that clutters up both my P. O. box and the local landfills.
Topclimber
@Immanentize: Serendipity is all. Scott Murphy was the Dem who replaced Gillibrand in the House. He voted for Obamacare and got swept away in Tea Party tsunami.
He probably lost some of the prosperous farmers in his district for calling the “death tax” out as GOP bull. I will always remember his argument against limitless inherited wealth. “I don’t think we need an aristocracy.”
Pirated wealth at least requires talent. The inherited kind, not so much.
@Roger Moore: Insurance valuations might help.
James E Powell
@Martin:
When I started teaching at the advance age of 50 I was shocked how many things had been turned over to textbook companies and other providers.
Roger Moore
@Hildebrand:
Because they’re made from the same porcelain and the same thickness as the rest of the toilet. Honestly, they should think about updating their choice of materials. There must be something better to make toilets out of these days.
SiubhanDuinne
@Another Scott:
Thanks. Did not know about that. (The DMMA apparently has little interest in publicising this initiative ?).
geg6
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Beaver County, but not far from the Washington County line. I have no idea where we place and a lot of people I know are getting them. My John got his first of the Pfizer and two of my co-workers (about my same age of 62) who are overweight have managed to score appointments. My oldest sister with Crohn’s and her husband with MS got them. And my other BIL with Type 2 diabetes has an appointment this week. None for me though.
sab
@debbie: City taxes are a mostly midwestern aberration. Most of the US doesn’t have them.
J R in WV
@Nicole:
We don’t always agree on everything, but I think you are dead on target here.
Over the past decade several high-ranking in-charge media executives have been fired/retired for their sexual abuse habits, which in the aftermath are astounding in their brazen horror.
Maybe, slowly, things will change as more of those bastards are uncovered and shit-canned. I’m trying to turn over a new optimistic leaf here… I don’t want anyone to set me straight, either!! Let me enjoy the delusion while spring is happening!
ETA: I think women in the course of their career training should all join some self-defense martial arts group and learn how to put an attacker down hard and fast.
Ruviana
@SiubhanDuinne: You might try Catalogchoice.org which has worked pretty well for me.
Redshift
@artem1s:
Wouldn’t surprise me. My not-particularly-informed opinion is that the Paulites were the source of a lot of the segment of the Bernie campaign in ’16 that consistently put “all who question the Master must be destroyed” above any effort to appeal to voters, since that was a feature of the Ron Paul cult as well.
“Kamala is a cop” illustrates the pattern – pick something that makes the person Unacceptable (and that doesn’t make any attempt to engage with the actual debate at hand), and then repeat it ad nauseum, until it becomes a verbal tic that comes out in any context, even when The Master is no longer competing with that person.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@rikyrah: Yep. I live in the St Louis area. Missouri has become so Trumpy, I’m not sure a Democrat could win the Governor’s race. However, at this point, I hate Parson so much I would donate to any Republican who primaries him. I no longer care. I want him driven out of office.
geg6
@Booger:
No, that apparently isn’t possible. Plus, even if that was possible, I still couldn’t do it because it would go to a fax/scanner/copier that is in an open space used by multiple departments. The things I need to copy have to be under lock and key because of so much personal information (such as parent tax forms) and PII (mainly SS#s and VA file #s). The can’t sit in a tray of the copier until someone gets them. I go in every Wednesday to man the office (we all take turns) and spend half the day printing.
J R in WV
@Roger Moore:
How about the close of business, April 15th?
And all the other stuff, what they paid for it + inflation since date of purchase — save your receipts on that Picasso, bro!! This isn’t hard for the most part.
Our home, we have a visit from the assessor’s office every few years, and pay real estate taxes on their declared value, which we could appeal if it seemed out of line. Why can’t Betsy deVos do exactly the same on her estates and yachts?
debbie
@sab:
LOL, New York City, where I used to live, has them. I cannot catch a break with taxes!
geg6
@Martin:
My printer is not networked. I would have to use one that is in a shared space with other departments.
Roger Moore
@Another Scott:
A fair amount of the junk mail I get these days isn’t even addressed; they just pay the mail to deliver it to everyone on their route. Any system designed to shut down junk mail will need to deal with that crap.
Brachiator
@Martin:
However, we still live in a country in which a great deal of business activity has been suspended, and some businesses have gone under. Many of these are businesses which employed lower wage workers.
I believe that economic recovery will be strong, but highly asymmetric, if we have a significant recovery from the pandemic.
More small retail stores, restaurants, etc may shut down. Other businesses may never re-open. New businesses may bloom.
Some CA businesses are taking advantage of the employee vs contractor ruling and law and are firing employees and replacing them with contractors.
The CA economy is fairly strong. Just heard this morning that we are actually looking at a surplus. This is why Gov Newsom has been able to get the recent law with $600 payments for some taxpayers.
But economic conditions are highly local.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
I’m surprised you need to print stuff just to have a paper copy. The federal bureaucracy I deal with is just as happy to deal with PDFs. The only reason we wind up printing stuff is that we need to sign and date it for attributability*. After that, we scan it and deal with the scan.
*All our documents need to be Attributable, Legible, Contemporaneous, Original, and Accurate. A true copy- one that preserves even stray marks on the paper- is considered to be as good as the original.
J R in WV
@Frankensteinbeck:
This is pretty good stuff, Frankensteinbeck, Betty Cracker class quality. Keep up the good work!!
ETA, tune up a little bit. Spel a name korrektly, etc…
bnatebuckeye
@cmorenc:
This sounds like every person on my Facebook feed that shout “I’m a Libertarian” all of a sudden.
It’s infuriating. The GOP is the problem and the worst you can say about Democrats is that they stop short only because the GOP always gets to control the narrative and is reinforced by media trying at all times to “Present All Sides”
Brachiator
@Frankensteinbeck:
Racists have relied on voter suppression. A hundred and fifty years ago, the racists were largely Southern Democrats. These racist rats scurried to the Republican Party when Nixon invited them in.
Ken
@James E Powell: The UK may be reacting to last year’s assessment fiasco, which used a “machine learning” program to adjust the teacher assessments of students. Link, link, link.
Turned out the main thing the program had learned was that grades tended to be higher in wealthy postal zones and at private schools. So it increased the teacher-assessed grades for rich students and reduced those of poor students.
PST
@Roger Moore: Have you considered an Intel NUC? It’s a little 4 by 4 by 2 inch box to which you add your own memory, solid-state drive, and operating system. Some people have graphics requirements that are too great, but that might only be with games or processing video. It makes for an exceptionally neat desktop, with just one USB-C cable from the NUC to a big monitor, so which any USB devices (like a camera) can be connected. The Bluetooth is good, so most peripherals can be wireless. I like mine a great deal, and they keep getting better.
NotMax
@geg6
Sounds as if you’ve no need to go the whole nine yards with a printer. Might consider looking at a monochrome (black and white) laser printer. No ink to fadiddle with; the toner cartridge lasts a lo-o-ong time. Several reasonably priced models, which not infrequently can be found on sale.
No complaints at all about the one from Brother which I’ve been using for more than a decade.
NotMax
@Hildebrand
Maybe something like a simple piece of slate?
geg6
@Roger Moore:
For me, the VA requires hard copy files for every student with VA educational benefits for the current academic year and for three years previous. They come in person every two years to audit me. As you can imagine, I have storage issues in my office.
geg6
@NotMax:
Thanks. I’ll look into that in case I decide to get one for personal use. But I’ll stick with letting the University pay for my printing.
Roger Moore
@PST:
I do some processor intensive photo processing that I suspect a NUC wouldn’t be happy with. Also, I still have a lot of data on spinning rust (in a RAID 1) that wouldn’t fit in a NUC box. And I don’t know if their onboard video would work well with a 4K monitor.
Roger Moore
@geg6:
That’s crazy. The FDA is just fine with printouts from a scanned copy, or even just the scanned PDF. We still keep our paper originals, but they can be archived off-site.
Another Scott
@Roger Moore: Oh, you’re “Postal Customer Local”, too??
Yeah, that’s one of the problems with trying to get on such a list.
I believe it’s supposed to help with things like unsolicited credit card offers (which seem to come in waves here). I haven’t been willing to chance it that it would actually work in that case, either.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@geg6: I know it’s maybe not worth fighting with now, given the plague and all, but these days any printer that is attached to your office computer can be “shared” over the network and act like a network printer. Your IT folks would need to make your office computer “visible” on the network to you at home (presumably on your VPN connection), but once that is done, then you could print to your office computer’s printer as easily as if it were right next to you.
I don’t know how responsive your IT folks are to requests like that, but it sounds like it would save you a lot of time in your office if they would enable that capability for you.
(Sorry for the noise if you already know this but IT policies prevent it from being implemented.)
Cheers,
Scott.
PST
@Roger Moore: The NUC will support a very fast processor, but photo processing may rely on offloading work to a high end graphics card. I used to be a dedicated hobbyist, starting back in the 80s, always assembling from components, obsessed by overclocking and cooling. It got old. This is by far most powerful computer I’ve ever had, and well beyond my needs. I am running a 4K monitor and I believe it can support two of them.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Martin: Property taxes are not a federal tax, the problem is the Constitutional restrictions on taxation.
Roger Moore
@PST:
The heaviest duty photo stuff I do (stitching panoramas) does offload the work onto the GPU, and it still takes a while. And, as I said, I have enough data on traditional hard drives that I want a case that can hold several. I want to have as much of the stuff that’s supposed to be a permanent part of my computer inside the case as possible.
catclub
Wow, I thought the tax bill did the opposite: made independent contractors – self employed, much better off than employees doing the same things, because they had business expense deductions.
evodevo
@yellowdog: Yep…paid my PO wages for 23 years…I don’t complain, I just toss it in the wood-burning furnace in the winter and the trash in the summer…
Geminid
@?BillinGlendaleCA: A friend practiced trusts and estate law in Atlanta, and into it enough to sit on a Georgia bar panel that reviewed state law in this area. Federal taxation was a big subject in his practice. Although he is somewhat of a socialist politically, he says that a federal wealth tax would violate established Constitutional law, and like the federal income tax would require a Constitutional amendment to be allowed.
Ruckus
@Nicole:
As I said back then I had known Leeann Tweeden in a professional and first name basis. I did not know her political feelings when this came out and stated that I don’t think she would have said this if it wasn’t true. I stand behind this, I feel she was often treated with a lack of respect that she really, really didn’t deserve.
Ruckus
@SiubhanDuinne:
Count me in.
The number of days that I’m walking back from the mailbox thinking of taking out the return letter in the junk mail and writing something with a Sharpie, using only 4 letter words and sending it back are far more than the not days.
Dan B
@Immanentize: Carnegie is right up there with Bill Gates Sr. He’s been a champion of the Estate Tax forever. His feeling is entitled kids who have never felt the dread of financial insecurity , or who have been pampered, will have no empathy for this segment of the greater community.
I organized a panel with Sr and a batch of prominent progressive religious leaders who made the moral case. The headline in the paper the next day read, “Religious Leaders Call Estate Tax Moral and Fair”. Boy howdy did “Moral” go viral on social media
Gates Sr made the practical pitch and the religious leaders made the moral and spiritual pitch.