eudemonist
1yr ago
At bars/restaurants, a driver comes around once a week and restocks as necessary, entering the data on a handheld. So granular to weekly at the distributor level.
Most likely, sales data is sampled from a selection of retailers almost real-time and statisticified by paid analysts.
eudemonist
1yr ago
I tried that fest and got a 49, pretty well below the bar. I got some points for not using a lot of movie or television quotes in my daily conversation, which I found odd. An online test at Clinical Partners was also pretty sure I'm not autistic. I wonder if it's simply my online persona: I do tend to care about details.
To me, though, details matter: in this case, the detail that
1, Yes, plenty of people claimed it was a tax from the get-go, and
B. Democrats swore up one wall and down the other it wasn't, and the President, ridiculed people for "making up words", then when shown the word in the dictionary ridiculed more instead of addressing the argument.
It was signature, huge legislation passed while wilfully deceiving the American public. I don't see it as an "autistic" or irrelevant detail at all.
the "it's a tax" argument was widely regarded as pretextual at best.
Again I'm gonna have to differ here, and I think the Stephanopoulos interview bears me out. George brought out a dictionary and Obama handwaved away the meaning of "tax", for gosh sake.
was up to my eyeballs in debates (mostly with other lawyers) about this issue at the time and I just never encountered a serious and well-developed claim that the question turned on "it's a tax."
What question, precisely? "Can Congress make people pay this" or "Is a penalty for inaction constitutional"? Because, if it's the latter, your lawyer friends missed the forest for the trees, I'd say.
this is all a weirdly autistic tangent
You know, I seem to be called/implied to be autistic fairly frequently online. Maybe I should get checked or something. Is there a test? To me, if it was important enough for you to use as a point in your post, it's important enough to warrant accuracy, or further exploration if needed. If we retcon the shit out of history, we can't learn much from it.
eudemonist
1yr ago
Would you agree it's an arrangement or agreement or deal between parties? What would you call it?
eudemonist
1yr ago
Would you agree that borrowing a library book is a type of contract one enters into with the library?
eudemonist
1yr ago
They're not talking about something else, though. Did you read the full conversation? I just quoted that bit (and elided some) because I found Stepho's pulling out a dictionary and President Obama's swift about-face on "words have a meaning" amusing. But prior to that bit, it's quite clear they're discussing a penalty (Shared Responsibility Payment, "responsibility" being the buzzword) for not buying insurance:
STEPHANOPOULOS: ...during the campaign. Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don't. How is that not a tax?
OBAMA: (evasion evasion)... we've driven down the costs, we've done everything we can and you actually can afford health insurance, but you've just decided, you know what, I want to take my chances. And then you get hit by a bus and you and I have to pay for the emergency room care, that's...
STEPHANOPOULOS: That may be, but it's still a tax increase.
OBAMA: No. That's not true, George.
You're correct that in 2012 SCOTUS ruled the penalty (which is what makes the purchase a "mandate" rather than a friendly request) a tax--it's the only way Congress has power to impose such a thing. It's simply amusing because of how hard the administration has pushed "it's not a tax!", then subsequently had to go to court and argue it was a tax.
eudemonist
1yr ago
When neither the proponents nor the opponents of the bill claim it's a proper tax
I'm not sure if you're making a distinction with "proper" tax, but opponents, heck even Democrats, definitely claimed it was a tax, and it was a live enough question to get addressed in a one-on-one (sorry, it's an amp link):
STEPHANOPOULOS: That may be, but it's still a tax increase.
OBAMA: No. that's not true, George. the -- for us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase....
STEPHANOPOULOS: But it may be fair, it may be good public policy...
OBAMA: No, but -- but, George, you -- you can't just make up that language and decide that that's called a tax increase.
STEPHANOPOULOS: I -- I don't think I'm making it up. Merriam Webster's Dictionary: Tax -- "a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes."
OBAMA: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam's Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you're stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn't have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition. I mean what...
eudemonist
1yr ago
Your examples are actions one is duty-bound to take by the terms of the contract that was entered into, by parking in the spot or by checking out the book. Don't you see the difference?
"Breaking a contract" is an "action", and in either of these cases is directly comparable to petty theft of the equivalent funds--the library has a loss of the use of its book, or the city has loss of its parking space (or remuneration therefor). Someone who never did anything but sit at home, and consequently never used the streets or the library, would never be subject to those fines.
eudemonist
1yr ago
But in those cases, I've parked somewhere, or broken my contract with the library--there is a punishable action.
eudemonist
1yr ago
Yeah, I agree with everything you've said here. "Multiple genes could likely prejudice toward ideologies" is a better way to put it than "liberal gene", with the relative strength of that prejudice tough to decouple.
eudemonist
1yr ago
The government started giving a bunch of money to companies, and telling individuals they must do the same; I didn't give any money to any companies so the IRS made me give them money instead. Questions to determine the amount I had to pay were based on things like AGI, part of my tax calculation, and the resulting amounts were entered back into my tax calculation. If I increased my withholding, I had to write less of a check in April--but I only ever wrote one check, to the same people I'd always written checks to when paying my taxes.
Is there any other thing where one can be "fined" or punished for doing nothing? Aren't negative consequences usually to deter behavior, not compel it?
eudemonist
1yr ago
essentially no one thought of as a "tax."
Wait, what? Who thought that? My sense is that everyone knew it was a tax, but that label had been avoided by proponents of the bill.
It sure felt a lot like a tax, given that it was a box to check or uncheck when filing a federal tax return which changed the amount of the check one had to write to the treasury.
The Corner, but more particularly, The Wire, which is the fully flourished version. Without overstatement, one of the best television shows ever made.
EDIT: Looks like The Corner is on YouTube, free. https://youtube.com/watch?v=iMJMOoW8y6o
eudemonist
1yr ago
The Corner
You've seen the shows?
eudemonist
1yr ago
Very generally speaking, Conservatism is based in risk avoidance: the core conflict is basically a risk/reward evaluation of courses of action, weighing potential benefits of further societal optimization against potential dangers of disrupting a currently-mostly-functional complex dynamic system. It seems like such a thing might well have genetic components.
Individualism vs. Collectivism also seems as though it could well be genetically influenced: different species are gregarious to different extents, and that almost certainly interplays with genetics. Williams syndrome in humans is a clear display of genetic changes to sociability and desire for the presence of others.
Besides, if we accept that genetics affect I.Q., well then obviously--the genes that give the low IQs are the liberal genes, duh! (jkjk don't hurt me)
eudemonist
1yr ago
However, guys who are mainly driven by wanting validation and/or intimacy can sometimes encounter the problem that they want validation for being themselves as they are now, they want intimacy for being as they are now.
I want to take a screwdriver
Mutilate my face
Find a beautiful woman
Make her love me for what I am
Then say I don't need it and walk away
- Hank Rollins
eudemonist
1yr ago
unsubstantiated at best
Nitpicking phrasing (though I disagree overall as well), "at best"? So, at moderate, it's worse than unsubstantiated? Which (to me) means actually the inverse of truth? So, at moderate, mobile quarterbacks are less injury-prone, is the hypothesis?
Brady, Young, Fahurev, his benchwarmer Rogers or whatever, Montana, Aikman, were thus the injury-prone cohort, while the less-injury-prone cohort spearheaded by Randall Cunningham (who in the o-fkn-riginal Madden Football is the greatest player to ever fondle a pigskin), Michael Vick, Cam Newton, and Robert Griffin III's surgical team.
Sorry, I'm being tipsy and a bit smarmy. Base point is that, of the top ten qbs in rush yds/game, two have played 100+ games. Of the top twenty, same two. Top 25 qbs in rush yds/gm, a total of three have played over 100 games.
Statistical analysis fails here because of the changing nature of the game, small sample sizes, and an inordinate number of confounding factors. Some mobility is good and contributes to longevity, but turning the passer into a runner exposes them to blows of a fundamentally different nature than those a passer takes--this isn't theoretical or statistical, but real, in a very tangible way for the guy getting smashed by a few hundred flying pounds. This isn't to say pocket qbs don't get laid out, but the repetitive stresses simply cannot be ignored, and the most holistic grand-scale view possible of "do running qbs hold up?" says, no, they do not. RBs have a lifespan of maybe six years...to play a QB like an RB and expect a twenty year lifespan is foolish.
eudemonist
1yr ago
Out of curiosity, any Mottizens play Herzog Zwei on Genesis? I feel this crowd may have.
eudemonist
1yr ago
Ah, very cool. Sampling is a big part of auditing, as is directionality: vouching, for example, goes from final answer back to source documents, while tracing works the other way, from source to final, in order to verify existence and completeness respectively.
General auditing is directed more toward finding error than fraud, but forensic stuff interests me quite a bit.
eudemonist
1yr ago
Are you an auditor? What you did with the names would be referred to as "vouching": taking a sample from your population and finding the source documents for those in the sample, to verify management's assertion that those transactions actually exist.
eudemonist
1yr ago
From an accounting standpoint, depreciation expense would be the most likely way to offset income for an operation with multiple real properties, coupled of course with under-table cash deals and write offs of questionable "business" expenses. With an array of properties and investment backing, it's easy to grow the company, bring home plenty of dollars, and still be "zero income".
eudemonist
1yr ago
An order in backlog is better than an order that switches to a substitute good, namely a used vehicle. Besides which, Dealer Agreements often are in the form of a promise to buy X units at Y prices over 24 months or whatever, so may limit steep hikes.
From an economic actor standpoint, if I expect price hikes to be temporary, I'm gonna postpone my transaction. If I expect a slow but steady rise in prices, I'm gonna move it forward.
eudemonist
1yr ago
Rarely is it mentioned that Shokin was then replaced with a prosecutor who dropped those prosecutions entirely.
eudemonist
1yr ago
Let the rabbits wear glasses condoms!
Let's keep in mind the context here--the examples given of rightist/right wing policies are tough-on-crime things like Three Strikes. Whether that's "right wing government" or not is not really relevant: it's a less-progressive stance than the alternative at the time.
More options
Context Copy link