ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
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17hr ago
Maybe he's alluding to the fact that government employees have lenient bosses and leisurely schedules that allow them to take solid two-week or three-week blocks of vacation leave around Christmas and New Year's, and large proportions of them use this opportunity to the fullest.
ToaKraka
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22hr ago
- During a telephone call, a prisoner's romantic partner asks him whether he is gay. The prisoner becomes angry and ends the call. On the next day, he writes a two-page email explaining that he is not gay, he hates homosexual people, and if he had been at home he would have shot her for insulting him so badly.
- The prison reads the email, blocks it from being sent, charges the prisoner with the offense of threatening another person with bodily harm, convicts him of that offense, and imposes punishment of 90 days of solitary confinement, 60 days of lost good-behavior credit, and 15 days of lost recreational privileges.
- The appeals panel reverses. The prisoner's objective in writing this email obviously was to convince his romantic partner that he was not homosexual, not to threaten her or anybody else with bodily harm. Therefore, the conviction was arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable.
In order to get a horizontal line (HTML element <hr/>), you need to type three hyphens ("---"), not a bunch of em dashes ("———").
ToaKraka
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5d ago
GURPS also incorporates rules for forced marching, terrain difficulty, and encumbrance, but I omitted them from this simplified overview.
ToaKraka
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5d ago
Markdown is just a middleman format. Writing in raw HTML and CSS from the beginning makes more sense.
Obligatory mention that GURPS, unlike Dungeons & Dragons, has multiple sets of rules for long-distance travel, depending on how much detail you want. Assuming default humans with no encumbrance at all:
- Basic Set p. 351: Hiking achieves a speed of 50 miles per day, at no cost.
- Low-Tech Companion 2: Weapons and Warriors p. 32: Hiking achieves a speed of 2.5 miles per hour, at a cost of 1 FP (Fatigue Point) per hour. Once you've lost 7 FP, you move at half speed. Resting regenerates 6 FP per hour. Some quick algebra indicates that the optimal strategy for a 16-hour day is 14 hours and 40 minutes of hiking mixed with 1 hour and 20 minutes of resting, for an overall speed of 37 miles per day. But you may want to keep your FP higher than 3, just in case you are ambushed while hiking.
- The Last Gasp (Pyramid vol. 3 iss. 44 (Alternate GURPS II) p. 4): It's unrealistic that your speed isn't reduced until you've lost an entire 7 FP. Instead, your speed is reduced by one-fifth after you've lost 5 FP, and by two-fifths after you've lost 9 FP. Also, it's unrealistic that your FP regenerate at 6 per hour. Instead, your reservoir of FP is divided into 5 points of mild fatigue, which regenerate at 1 FP per 2 hours, and 5 points of severe fatigue, which regenerate at 1 FP per 8 hours. Some quick algebra indicates that the optimal strategy for a 16-hour day is 8 hours and 40 minutes of hiking mixed with 7 hours and 20 minutes of resting, for an overall speed of 22 miles per day.
- Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures p. 21: Hiking achieves a speed of 2.5 miles per hour. Instead of doing a bunch of finicky FP math, just assume that you spend 30 minutes striking camp in the morning, 3 hours resting throughout the day, 30 minutes pitching camp in the evening, and 12 hours actually walking, for an overall speed of 30 miles per day. If you are ambushed while hiking, you are missing 1 FP when the encounter starts.
ToaKraka
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5d ago
ToaKraka
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7d ago
On 4chan's /o/ board I've read about the phenomenon of repeated repossessions from people too stupid to understand finances, but I never sought out any official materials on the topic, so I was surprised to stumble across it while browsing random (pseudo-)court opinions.
This IRS investigation was due to poor accounting, not to any allegedly-exploitative lending practices.
This is the Friday Fun Thread. I posted this opinion to enable people to laugh at the car buyers. Alternatively, you can laugh at the dealership, if you prefer:
Around 2014 Mr. Aboui decided to close HPPO because his family was experiencing serious health issues and because HPPO was unprofitable.… HPPO ceased business by 2018.
Respondent [the Commissioner of Internal Revenue] began an audit of petitioners’ and HPPO’s returns in September 2015. **At that time petitioners’ accountant was gravely ill, and he later died. His death contributed to a lack of progress on the audit. In October 2018 petitioners gave a power of attorney to a new representative who erroneously told the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revenue agent (RA) that HPPO was a cash basis taxpayer and that HPPO did not include the total sale prices in gross receipts in the year of sale. Other actions by the new representative further delayed production of HPPO’s records.** Petitioners later replaced the representative in an attempt to resolve the audit. However, by that time, after working on the case for nearly five years, the RA decided to close the audit.During the audit petitioners produced or provided access to the DMV sales reports and dealer jackets as well as other records. These documents contained sufficient information to determine HPPO’s gross income but likely not HPPO’s deductible expenses. Petitioners delayed providing access to HPPO’s accounting software because HPPO did not retain a license for the software after it ceased business. The RA never had access to the software, but petitioners reactivated it before trial.
Or you can laugh at the IRS:
Because the RA concluded that petitioners did not provide sufficient records or access to HPPO’s accounting software, she went through the arduous process of reviewing thousands of pages of bank statements and canceled checks to determine whether the debits from HPPO’s bank accounts were used to pay expenses related to HPPO’s business.
When the parties were preparing for trial, petitioners offered thousands of pages of records to substantiate HPPO’s expenses and COGS as well as HPPO’s income. Despite encouragement from the Court, respondent did not review the records.
The RA testified that she treated HPPO as a cash basis taxpayer. The Code requires the IRS to use a taxpayer’s chosen method of accounting as long as it clearly reflects income. It is clear to the Court that HPPO used a hybrid method of accounting that reported its gross receipts from car sales using the accrual method and its expenses (and possibly other income) using the cash method. Taxpayers are permitted to use hybrid methods. Respondent has not argued that HPPO’s hybrid method does not clearly reflect income, and we find that it does. Rather, respondent tries to deny that the RA used the cash method even though the RA testified at trial that she used the cash method.
Mr. Aboui was incredibly forthright in this testimony. He admitted that HPPO received cash and used it to pay wages and other expenses. Also, HPPO acquired significant inventory through trade-ins that was not accounted for as debits in HPPO’s bank records. These facts, in addition to the RA’s calculations that show reporting of gross income significantly greater than HPPO’s deposits for 2013–15, make use of the bank deposit analysis to determine HPPO’s COGS and deductible business expenses extremely inaccurate. Furthermore, there is no indication from our review of HPPO’s returns that it deducted the payments from HPPO’s bank accounts that the RA identified as nondeductible.
Random opinion from the US Tax Court:
During the years at issue Mohamad Nasser Aboui was the sole shareholder of HPPO [Corp. Autoville Motors], an S corporation for federal tax purposes. HPPO owned several used car dealerships. Mr. Aboui formed HPPO in 2009 by consolidating multiple used car lots that he owned. He contributed $5,167,089 of used cars to HPPO for its starting inventory.Most of HPPO’s customers had poor credit. Many did not have checking accounts and paid HPPO in cash. Often HPPO used the cash to pay its employees and other expenses and did not deposit it into HPPO’s bank accounts. HPPO offered in-house financing to its customers. It financed approximately 90% to 95% of its sales and retained security interests in the cars. When HPPO financed a car purchase, it reported the sale price as income in the year of sale.
Customers repaid the loans in less than 10% of HPPO’s sales. HPPO repossessed approximately 25% of the cars within three to four months of purchase and approximately 50% within one year. During the years at issue HPPO was unable to repossess over 250 cars after the buyers stopped making payments. When HPPO repossessed a car, it typically was in worse condition than when HPPO had sold it, sometimes with serious mechanical issues from the buyer’s failure to service the car.
HPPO bartered with mechanics for repair services in exchange for rental of HPPO’s garage space or as payment for the purchase of a used car. Mr. Aboui started using the barter system to recoup equipment and other costs that he incurred to set up HPPO’s repair services. Typically, the cars that HPPO sold to the mechanics were older and required too many repairs for HPPO to fix for resale. The mechanics submitted invoices for their services. HPPO reported the invoiced amounts as expenses and also reported the related income.
ToaKraka
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10d ago
[Here's one], but it's a 1998 custom build.
You forgot to add the URL.
ToaKraka
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10d ago
Maybe the client said "I want a big house", and the architect failed to explain to the client that a big house was not needed. (Bigger house → more billable hours?)
ToaKraka
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12d ago
Relaxing progressionslop from Acaswell:
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A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World (first two volumes moved to Kindle)
ToaKraka
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13d ago
note your graph is by number of transactions, not dollar value of the transactions
The graph for that metric indicates near-identical median transaction sizes of around 230 dollars. (Mean transaction size is 250 k$ for Bitcoin vs. 50 k$ for Litecoin.)
Given the market-cap differences between the two, if Bitcoin had a decent protocol for transactions, I expect there would be 15–20× as many BTC transactions per day compared to LTC.
I don't see how that's relevant to the original question of whether Litecoin has "died out". In my opinion, even if Litecoin has died out as a store of value (I have no opinion on that question), the combination of half-as-large transaction volume and near-identical median transaction size means that Litecoin has not died out as a medium of exchange in comparison to Bitcoin.
ToaKraka
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14d ago
the forks have basically died out
Litecoin is a fork of Bitcoin, and I would not characterize it as having "died out". Its transaction volume is about half that of Bitcoin.
ToaKraka
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14d ago
If wishes were fishes, there would be no room in the ocean. (the line that has most firmly stuck in my memory from the copious Redwall reading that I conducted twenty years ago)
ToaKraka
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14d ago
I have not seen any credible accusations that votes themselves were fraudulently cast
The intelligence service also said access data for official Romanian election websites was published on Russian cyber crime platforms. The access data was probably procured by targeting legitimate users or by exploiting the legitimate training server, the agency said.
It added that it had identified over 85,000 cyber attacks which aimed to exploit system vulnerabilities.
So the election systems may have been hacked.
ToaKraka
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14d ago
There has been some discussion of architecture lately. Have you considered how the square–cube law affects building design?
Using the International Residential Code's prescriptive tables, it is easy to design a code-compliant 30-foot (9-meter), 2700-ft2 (250-m2) cubic house. With the International Fire Code's occupancy rules, we can assume that such a house can contain 13 people. But what if your scope suddenly changes and you need to design a 60-foot, 21600-ft2, 108-person apartment building?
Obviously, dead load and live load will increase by a factor of eight, and wind load will increase by a factor of four. Therefore, we can generate a slapdash design by simply: (1) octupling all the stud and footing area, which resists the dead load and live load; (2) quadrupling the layers of sheathing, which resists the shear force of the wind; and (3) multiplying the depths of all the truss joists and girders by three, which will increase their resistance to dead loads and live loads by nine.
As they say on 4chan: Wa la!
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