EvanTh
4mo ago
Interesting! And rather reassuring!
Is there anything published where I can read more about this?
EvanTh
4mo ago
The median voter owns a house with a 3% mortgage.
Do you have numbers on that?
EvanTh
4mo ago
I live in Washington; we've had universal vote-by-mail for a while now too.
I don't know if all our elections are fraudulent. They're doing a lot of good things to secure them, but there're still inherent gaps. And I'm very uncomfortable about that.
EvanTh
5mo ago
Truck Insurance Exchange v. Kaiser Gypsum Co.
8-0. (Yes, eight. Alito recused himself.)
Apparently it's unclear why, or at least I haven't been able to find out why in a little websearching. But the best guess from Twitter is that Alito owns stock in one of the litigating companies.
EvanTh
5mo ago
Or it could be Calvin Coolidge taking the oath in the parlor of his father's vacation home, before his father who was a justice of the peace.
EvanTh
5mo ago
I think some people's minds will be changed by the headlines trumpeting "Trump convicted on all counts!"
EvanTh
6mo ago
Does Uber collect payroll taxes?
No, their drivers are all considered independent contractors. A driver's supposed to pay the payroll taxes himself when he files income taxes.
EvanTh
6mo ago
Princip did nothing for Serbian nationalism.
Princip started a chain of events that led to the Serbian-dominated Kingdom of Yugoslavia. On the other hand, there was a bloody war in-between which he deeply regretted (and didn't live to see the end of).
EvanTh
6mo ago
I agree, the odds of Trump being assassinated are low but worth some attention.
However, the odds of Trump dying, or losing his mental function, of natural causes are significantly higher. For that reason even if nothing else, he should choose a good VP candidate.
EvanTh
6mo ago
No, they don't know it. I volunteer with the VITA program doing tax prep for low-income people, and most of my clients don't appreciate that the government is taking money from their paychecks to pay tax. I explain it to them every year, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't stick.
I'm pretty sure half my clients don't even read their W-2's or other tax forms, except to go "this's a tax form from my employer / bank / charity / etc; guess I'll bring it when I go do taxes."
EvanTh
6mo ago
The IRS does publish just that, with two pie charts and text, at the end of the Form 1040 instructions!
- Social Security, Medicare, and other retirement: 29%
- National defense, veterans, and foreign affairs: 15%
- Social programs: 33%
- Physical, human, and community development: 13%
- Net interest on the debt: 5%
- Law enforcement and general government: 5%
In fiscal year 2022... federal income was $4.897 trillion and outlays were $6.273 trillion, leaving a deficit of $1.376 trillion.
Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, hardly anyone reads it.
EvanTh
7mo ago
If you're going to be crushing the prisoners' balls to extract confessions absolutely NOTHING they say can be trusted.
What evidence do you have this happened, or was even threatened, at Nuremberg?
EvanTh
7mo ago
But on the other hand, individual knowledge can make a difference.
If I sell my neighbor a gun, ordinarily, I'm fine. But if I've heard my neighbor talking about wanting to shoot his ex, and then he goes and does that with the gun I've sold him, I might be in trouble. I'm comfortable with there being some similar point at which parents are responsible not to let their teenager have a gun.
(Do these particular parents meet it? I don't know the facts well enough to confidently say.)
EvanTh
7mo ago
Indeed!
This spread dates back to the Civil War, when there were a lot of traitors whom the government would rather not put to death. In the event, most of them weren't even charged, but Congress wanted to have that option available.
EvanTh
7mo ago
And they often needed that maid, because modern household appliances didn't exist yet.
EvanTh
7mo ago
Seems to me the Kitos War, a rebellion against the occupying Romans, counts as that too.
EvanTh
7mo ago
This works well and we don't have any voting fraud here.
How do you know you don't have any voting fraud?
EvanTh
7mo ago
but republicans have mostly won on the issue.
Not while an election-swinging share of states don't have it.
You could say they've won to the extent they realistically can, but that's different.
EvanTh
7mo ago
And I have a value disagreement with the people like that: No, having one's interests represented in government is not a human right.
And, if it were a human right, it would follow that we urgently need some Congresscritters pumping up astrology, others fighting to recriminalize adultery, others defunding traditional medicine and subsidizing homeopathy and acupuncture, and still others demanding free alcohol for all teenagers. People's interests (as they see them) are very diverse.
EvanTh
7mo ago
Or if they're inside a spoiler block, so you can look at them if you want and ignore them otherwise.
EvanTh
9mo ago
This, especially given the Antonine Plague that struck during Marcus Aurelius's reign. It might've killed a quarter of the Empire, population it never had a chance to gain back afterwards. The Empire couldn't bounce back after Commodus's tyranny because it had just been seriously weakened.
I like to go with "Chinese Beijing".
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