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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2071 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 13, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Years ago, my dad told me about how in the early years of the AIDS crisis, the most at-risk groups were the 4 Hs: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users and Haitians. This led to a joke about how if you contracted AIDS, you'd have a very hard time persuading your parents that you're Haitian.

I was talking to an Armenian guy over the weekend, who mentioned that the name "Lilith" is very popular in Armenia. He was surprised and amused to hear about the other demographic in which the name is popular. This got me wondering: if you're a socially awkward autistic male feeling uncomfortable in his body, would you be able to persuade your parents that you're really Armenian?

Zoey is another classic transgender name. It reminds me of an old Simpsons joke about gay names

Luna is another one those guys like, I’ve noticed.

Just got done planting 300 row-feet of garlic, like 450 plants. Hopefully going to be a good crop next year, even though the last went in almost a month late.
The cloves are also much larger than the commercial seed I bought last year--basically planted the largest third of this year's crop. So that should give them a head start.

Probably overdo the garlic just because it's one of the few things you can do in the garden this time of year. But I use a ton of it and it's a remarkably good gift for the kind of people who like "organic garlic" as a health food.

The only kind of gardening I'd ever consider doing. It's a great spice and needed in small quantities. Wish I'd never learned of the whole seed oil controversy because crushed garlic in mayo is the best tasting thing I know of.

It's really the process of creating the unhealthy seed oils that make them dangerous, not necessarily the base ingredient. The cheap crap they put in highly processed food is created with harsh chemical processing and high heat. Anything could become unhealthy if prepared like that.

No. It's an unusual type of fatty acid.

The processing matters.

Which type?

Linoleic acid. I wouldn't say it's unusual, but you wouldn't normally get it in the concentrations you get in processed foods cooked in seed oil.

Canola oil has similar amounts of linoleic acid to chicken fat, and rather less linoleic acid than almonds or sesame oil.

There simply is no logical argument for why seed oils are uniquely bad for you to an extent that justifies online hysteria. You would think they were on the level of smoking two packs a day.

Natural source is only in nuts. That's a very novel food source. Hazelnuts were sometimes a staple food, but generally before 10k yrb ago people were primarily carnivorous.

Linoleic acid is an essential fatty acid that humans require in their diet.

There are seed oils and seed oils. Some things like cold pressed sunflower oil have been in our diet for centuries - so are probably safe-ish enough.

Actually, sunflower is the worst, canola best.

The whole thing is kinda dumb, the issues are marginal I believe. But it's hard to quantify. Best to avoid all such and fry in animal fats I guess. Ofc, pigs are fed omega-6 feed, so lard has a fairly high omega 6 content too.

best to avoid all such and fry in animal fats I guess.

Depends on what you worry about, but if its linoleic acid, animal fats are not the silver bullet. Pork fat is around 15% linoleic acid, chicken fat is around 20%.

The entire seed oil discussion is a red herring. Avoiding them only works because you end up eating less processed foods and less fried foods.

There are different kinds of sunflower oil, high-oleic, high-linoleic, and I guess maybe some in between.

I'm a big fan of the theory that it's not necessarily the crops themselves, but the adoption of crop dessication for cereal grains in the 1990s that caused "gluten intolerance" (that Americans don't seem to experience when eating bread in Europe), then the same thing happened with seed oils when they started using crop dessication for soy and oil crops in the 2000s and 2010s. Cereals, brassicas, and legumes are the most lindy foods that exist outside of animal products. It'd be bizarre if they caused persistent inflammation to humans over their histories without selecting it out of either the humans eating it or the plants themselves.

I also think that this is possibly why alcohol's J-curve is disappearing, despite alcohol being so lindy as well. Phthalates in tubing used in bottling plants, pesticide residues, and other rarified byproducts all end up in the final product and have started to outweigh the protective effects.

"gluten intolerance" (that Americans don't seem to experience when eating bread in Europe)

Isn't it basically a fad, like women declaring they're bi etc? In Europe I know IRL like 2 gluten intolerant people out of say, 100. Real but rare disease. In US it's massively overrepresented

Mayonnaise is not traditionally made with seed oils. Olive oil is traditional. The modern stuff is basically just a big canister of canola but there's no reason it should be so.

Yes, I found a two month old mayo jar in the back of my fridge recently, and was disturbed that it looked and smelled exactly the same as when it was opened. Probably time to start avoiding the modern stuff

Supposedly making your own is incredibly easy. An immersion blender, eggs, lemon, olive oil, salt, and pepper as a base and go from there. If I wasn't worried about raw egg consumption, I'd probably try it myself. It's on my 'try it out sometime' list

If I wasn't worried about raw egg consumption, I'd probably try it myself.

Stop being such a coward and do it. I swear I'm about to go on a hock-like quest to slap every safetyist on this site. I could just barely remain silent when it came to bicycle-helmet-wearers or fist-fight-avoiders, but when people are too afraid to make their own mayonnaise I have to speak up.

It's freaking tasty, you're missing out!

Here mayo ..goes rancid (yellowish crust) on the surface I guess after a couple of weeks storage after opening.

The shelf life of refrigerated mayo is about 3 months, fwiw

Surely olive oil is uncontroversial even among seed oil disrespecters.

Olive oil is respected, and also the oil of the fruit pulp. In this way it is similar to coconut, avocado, and palm oil.

Why not make toum?

Just make or buy a non-seed oil mayonnaise then?

I've heard some claims you can make a decent substitute using schmaltz but never attempted it.

Am a bit leery of working with uncooked eggs tbh.

I have seen both baconnaise and duckennaise advertised for sale, though I haven't tried either myself.

You can also make an eggless mayo with a spoonful or two of aquafaba, the liquid from a can of beans.

Wow, it's real. Huh.

IME it's practically a perfect egg white substitute in everything short of, uh, egg white omelettes. Good for baking, cocktails, etc.

I can also recommend Just Egg plant-based egg replacer for baking. My brother has an egg allergy but I've been able to bake some stuff that turned out pretty well using that.

Coming in at a sum total of 56 pages of Times New Roman 12 point font, including footnotes, in-text citations, tables of contents and authorities, not including appendices, I have finished my three final essays for the semester. One of these essays went through at least 12 distinct versions, the real number is probably closer to 15, but I have 12 saved in that folder so 12 is the number I'm going with.

Fortunately I have what I sincerely hope is the easiest possible semester coming up, so I should be able to cruise to graduation.

Use git?

Yeah... Though I guess non-devs might feel most comfortable composing in Word, or google docs now? I assume a google doc has "good enough" versioning you wouldn't need to keep 12 distinct versions.

For someone who is moderately technically inclined but who needs to do custom formatting in Word, for a class or whatever, there are two options that come to mind for using git. Both slightly janky.

The first is to unzip the .docx file, and version control that in git. Gitignore docx files themselves in the repo. Without unzipping git (at least used to) treat docx containers as binary files, so you won't be able to look at diffs. Microsoft doesn't supper love you unzipping office files, so unzipping requires extra steps.

The second option that comes to mind is to compose in markdown. Maybe GitHub flavored markdown, even editing a gist on girhub from your preferred browser. Or whatever your favorite markdown editor is. Then convert the markdown file to a .docx via pandoc. You're not done yet though, because the docx is probably a "web document" format, so you still need to apply your paged formatting and re-save as a "regular" word doc. This biggest advantage of this to me is not the versioning using git, it's being able to make comments to myself while composing. You do have to be careful though, different flavors and versions of markdown parsers treat comments differently.

Markdown is just a middleman format. Writing in raw HTML and CSS from the beginning makes more sense.

Grats!

Can we read them

One essay is privileged, the other two probably a bit more identifying than I'm comfortable with unfortunately.

DM them to me then.

Ok if anyone wants to look into cruises I found a great guy who is apparently really into filming cruises hah https://youtube.com/@ThePortLowdown

The idea of trying to make theme park-like rides and themed entertainment for cruise ships is kind of interesting to me from a design perspective, but I wouldn't want to ride on one.

I've always found the idea remarkably repelling.

I hate being in close proximity to people I don't know, I hate paying money for stuff I don't really need or enjoy.

Have you ever read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'd Never Do Again? It's vintage David Foster Wallace and is quite good.

https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf

What does it mean that I both love cruising and still find that to be one of the best writeups of a cruise I think I've ever read. I guess I'm a philistine.

It's very well crafted but all the wit in the world can't disguise the fact that it's written by a clinically depressed neurotic. I too have sometimes looked down and seen the gaping maw of existential dread, but outside those temporary moments of madness I have very little patience for wallowing. I want to shake him.

Interesting take. As a person who could also be described as clinically depressed and neurotic, I actually don't mind this part of his personality leaking into his writing. I don't mind depression or neuroticism leaking into anyone's writing so long as the writing is still entertaining or amusing. It's when you have the dull self-pitying storytelling that I get impatient and bored.

lol my thoughts exactly.

Nope.

Man, what Liminal spaces. I watched a good chunk of one of these videos. Hasn't made me want to cruise more but is fascinating

It is fascinating huh?? What’s wild to me is how much of the decor seems frozen in time. Very much older European vibes.

Why does everyone hate Destiny? I probably disagree with him on every issue but he seems likable, is able to reason, etc.

https://mrgirl.substack.com/p/the-destiny-report

Originally I disliked him because his debate style involved tossing random assertions out with absolute certainty. Any time I imagined myself discussing anything with him I could only picture getting drawn into numerous side arguments.

He's gotten more unhinged lately. I think he's been abusing adderall for a while now and it's catching up with him.

Since it's a fun thread... more than a decade ago I enjoyed a series called When Cheese Fails, a Starcraft II commentary show where two Canadians reviewed games in which one player attempts to "cheese" (use very un-orthodox or unsportsmanlike strategies which may be contempt worthy). https://youtube.com/watch?v=xftjDJBtF9U is where I first ever heard of Destiny. Even if you don't care about older starcraft ii, it might be interesting as a time capsule of gamer culture at the time in terms of both sexual and racial humor.

TIL Adam and Jeff are still doing sc2 casts. I thought they stopped years ago, thanks for the heads up!

Ah, that makes me think of vintage Day[9] Funday Mondays. A different time.

I just don't see how this is an acceptable tone for a public figure: https://x.com/TheOmniLiberal/status/1812575564093370795

Just go through the quote tweet chain, it starts with Destiny going 'A person in a crowd cheering for and supporting a traitor to this country caught a stray? I’m so sad, please.'

Kisin is openly pro-Ukraine anyway, it's shameless and perverse to say these things about him. Destiny is a despicable, disgusting individual.

Pro-proxy war isn't pro-Ukraine.

I don't like Kisin, I had him muted on twitter but he is firmly pro-Ukraine: https://x.com/search?q=from%3AKonstantinKisin%20ukraine&src=typed_query

He even says he thinks it's too late and that they can't win, that the proxy war is a bad idea. At least that's the gist I get from in front of a paywall: https://www.konstantinkisin.com/p/ukraine-and-the-age-of-cowards

Don't want to turn this into a CW but he deserves a post there. Disliked wannabe Overton window maintainer & spawn of a Russia looter.

There should be an 'every single time' but for people in Western countries involved in Russia discourse with these distinctly Eastern European names... Around Molinsky, watch your foreign policy?

I'm perfectly happy with fact-based criticism of people like Kisin but Destiny has the air of someone who sits around for an hour, seething, drafting and redrafting his adhominem to be as cutting as possible. So he calls Kisin of all people a Putin dickrider.

I should caveat that I've not watched much Destiny, but from what I have seen some of his rhetoric is quite extreme. On some issues he comes across as likeable and open minded, however he also seems to have an attitude that it's ok to engage in smears and underhanded tactics because his perceived political opponents do it, which is a worldview I find deeply unproductive.

What turned me off him the most was how he mocked the man who was killed at the Trump rally. I understand that people can get heated in the moment and make some ill-advised tweets, but when pressed on it while on Piers Morgan he completely doubled down and defended it (you can find the clips on YouTube if interested). I find that behaviour repugnant, no matter who it comes from.

No idea about him specifically - does it count if you hate political Twitch streamers in general? I have no idea about, uh, [googles], Steven Bonnell's specific ideas or personality, but in general I hate the trend of people relying on streamers or gamers for their political views. Even if he himself is great, I think it's an indictment of us collectively that the scene of which he is a part is significant.

I find him and his ilk intensely fake. I wouldn't say I hate him, but after the first few encounters whenever he comes on a podcast I do like I skip the episode. His politics feel workshopped for engagement.

Isn’t he a literal homosexual cuckold and an idpol leftist?

I dislike the entire debate bro culture and have done my best to avoid it. It seems related to a lot of very unhealthy things, namely parasocial relationships worshipping streamers/ecelebs and ideology as fashion trend. I have no particular reason to dislike him more than Nick Fuentes. I hope this isn't taken as rude because I'm genuinely curious, do you enjoy watching these people?

No, I don’t watch anything for debates / politics, I prefer reading for that because of efficiency. But clips of Destiny will come up in my feed (involuntarily), right now on Twitter because of Adam Friedland (involuntarily), and I’m confused why the consensus is that he is the Worst Person Ever. His personality seems likable and his demeanor is calm, so I can’t figure out what’s causing it.

Destiny seems to catch endless flak from Hasan and Vaush for (insert leftist infighting meme). I think its Palestine and Defund The Police that caused the biggest leftist rifts, so off the top of my head I would think that is what catches the ire of leftists.

There is much scorn to be levied at the entire streamer culture and the parasocial relationships engendered with especially pathetic hosts, but Destiny is really mid even by those standards. I love that Breadtube streamer types were convinced that getting Harris on their podcasts would have changed the electoral needle of young men, which is a hilarious lack of awareness of who even ends up listening to their pieces in the first place.

His personality seems likable and his demeanor is calm

I don't really follow him, but I've seen him sperg out more than once. Plus he's on some campaign to troll the right recently, so hardly surprising he's getting pushback.

You're right he can be likeable when he wants to, but he can get pretty abrasive and dishonest when he disagrees with someone.

Did we ever have a thread for Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis? A quick search suggests just one post, but perhaps more people have seen it by now.

Personally, it was the best of films, it was the worst of films. A plot that is barely there, constantly jumping from one thread to the other. Direction which swings from "yes, this is supposed to be so bad it's good" to "hey look how amazing I am at directing". Driver's main character can stop time just for no reason at all. For that matter, Driver and Esposito are called Catilina and Cicero, but the plot doesn't follow the Cataline conspiracy at all, and Catalina is also called Ceasar for some reason. The main macguffin of megalon is never explained, nor is Catalina's plan for the city. At the end there's some bizarre futuristic landscape that you accept, it really comes out of nowhere. None of the characters seem to have coherent motivations.

And despite all of that, this is an incredible watch. It's not been a great year for film thus far, but this was easily the best film of the year, ahead of the likes of the Substance, Challengers, and Mad Max. The cast is near perfect and know exactly how to play it from the serious to the scenery chewing (with the exception of Emmanuel, who should be someone who can act like they can't act, rather than someone who just can't act at all). Jon Voight whipping out a bow and arrow from his giant erection is easily the best scene of the year. After a too indulgent and even trollish first hour, Coppola just goes all out on the screen. It's often stunning and often hideous. I'm still not really sure how deliberate Coppola is throughout the film; some stuff is so blatant you have to believe he intended it to be bad, but when it gets good it gets really good as well. Did he just lose control, lack oversight? Who knows? The bad stuff is often hilarious and the good stuff is just good.

I really can't blame a lot of viewers and critics for not liking or understanding the film, it is really quite incoherent in a lot of places. Nonetheless, highly recommended

I watched jt in the theater and it has to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen, and I was rooting for it, since I knew going in that Copolla was going against the cultural grain.

Nathalie Emmanuel's performance is the worst I've ever seen on film. The dialogue between her and Driver are a joke, and delivered with zero chemistry. Aubrey Plaza is hilariously unconvincing.

The themes are broadcast in screaming capital letter, absolutely zero subtlety. "What do you think is the most important institution?" "Marriage" with no further comment.

There are a few good visual pieces but mostly it's a blown out, blurry mess when it tries to get fancy.

Then there's the fucking crossbow scene.

It gave me a lot to think about how such a great artist can put out such total drek.

I couldn't find the crossbow scene but I did find this scene, and wow.

Yeah that scene captures the movie well, it's not just rough or forgetful, but kind of a jaw droppingly overwritten, stilted, over budget high school play.

but this was easily the best film of the year, ahead of the likes of the Substance, Challengers, and Mad Max.

Have you seen Heretic yet? Because that's my winner this year, it's great. I am looking forward to Megalopolis though, although less now than I was five minutes ago lol.

No, I don't really care for horror so it probably wouldn't do much for me. I'm expecting Anora to take the top spot once I get round to it given Baker's films are always good

One thing I realized in reflection is when Caesar Catalina can stop time, he's a stand in for the director. So the love story between Catalina and Julia, released in the same year Francis Ford Coppola's wife passed away, and she also has the film dedicated to her, I think can help explain some of the disjointed story.

Another thought, the tone of Megapolis feels like an old-school studio made epic picture. Big name cast (Lawrence Fishburne, Jason Schwartzman, Dustin Hoffman are in total background rolls) big name director, very lofty original storyline. But it is a self-produced feature, studios refused to make it (and how much money it lost seems they were right). My thought is there is less of an appetite for studios for original epics, so movie like Megapolis will never be made in the future. Hence we are stuck with reboots rehashes rather than wholly new.

I've watched the first hour in two half hour sittings, yet to make it to the end.

best film of the year, ahead of the likes of the Substance, Challengers, and Mad Max

Pretty limp competition. I think my picks for best of the year are Late Night With The Devil and Strange Darling, neither of which are unmissable.

Typical for most years, there wasn't much at Cannes this time round and a lot of the Oscar bait will come out December/January.

I found it underwhelming, a 3/10. Some ideas were good, but the aesthetics were clumsy and outdated, with most scenes and storylines coming across as cheesy and vulgar. It felt like Coppola was torn between making an epic peplum or a movie that didn’t take itself seriously, and it completely fell flat for me.

Did you see it in a theater or is it on a streaming platform? We have a big TV and soundbar which is an approximation of a theater, if not quite there.

Just at home on a large TV. While plenty of the film is nice to look at, it's not a film I'd say needs the cinema experience

Trying to manage end-of-year job burnout at the moment.

I'm pretty exhausted and can barely even bring myself to competently write this comment, let alone work on clients' returns. I've been making an oddly large amount of stupid errors recently, which isn't really common for me; I'm generally known for having a fairly high quality of work, and often catch other people's mistakes rather than the other way around. My job has a very production-line quality to it; there is always another job, and the goal is to get the greatest amount of client work done with a high accuracy and in the shortest amount of time.

This failure to focus is... quite bad, considering that my job is one that requires a pretty large amount of sustained concentration - for every client I handle, I receive on average like forty different financial docs, each containing disparate pieces of info about their financial situation. I get provided with a gigantic corpus of tax legislation and accounting best practices (the former, especially, can get indecipherably complex) and have to identify which laws and guidelines to apply. There’s a lot of info missing often, and the gaps necessarily have to be filled in with some assumptions. My job is to receive incomplete and poorly arranged info from the client, decipher how to treat it based on a knotty, vague, conflicting tax code, and transform it into something comprehensible. When you're burned out, this appears almost insurmountable, paralysing to the extreme, and doing it quickly doesn't seem possible.

That level of concentration is really hard to maintain day after day for a sustained period of time; the job is monotonous and taxing at the same time (as much work in such fields is, to be fair). This funk has been slowly settling in throughout the entire year, but it's begun to really hit me after rushing out a bunch of urgent client work last week, and I've gotten into a pretty big slump. Even after work I can barely focus on anything I care about, and it feels almost like my brain is buffering whenever I try to concentrate at all. I find myself staring passively at my screen a lot, I've done that multiple times now writing this embarrassingly short comment.

This fucking sucks. Any advice for how to force your brain to hard reset over Christmas break? I'd very much like this feeling not to carry on to the new year, I don't think a whole year of running on fumes would be particularly healthy.

Speaking with some experience in your situation...the only reason you should be doing tax compliance in your career is if you own the practice and have your own hands on the levers of workload. I started having your exact experience just a couple years into my career. I hit the eject button and got into a different area of accounting.

If you can't do the same I don't have any advice for you, friend. Everyone who stays long enough has it take over their lives (and marriages).

Reading between the lines (and I may be wrong here), based on what sounds like a high volume of returns, you might even be doing multi-state tax compliance for state & local income and franchise tax from within a public accounting firm. If you're really doing this...man. Accountants are the janitors of the white collar world, and right now, you're the janitor's janitor, unclogging shitty toilets with your bare hands for a pittance. I can't be sure this is what you're doing, so I'd be happy to be wrong.

I'd second the comment about exercise, as well as trying to get more activity throughout the day. Some short fairly intense bursts of activity every hour or two can be helpful in keeping energy levels high (things like bodyweight exercises and jump rope).

It can be difficult to start on an exercise push when you're feeling exhausted, but it's helpful to remember that by and large if you want your body to generate energy you need to use energy, otherwise it defaults to rest and digest mode.

Ensuring you're eating ok and getting enough sleep is also pretty key in my experience.

Lastly I'd add that it's ok to spend some time staring at the wall, if that's what you need at the moment. At least for me, part of burnout comes from that sense of pushing against what I feel like I should be doing, and it can be helpful to acknowledge that I need a period of recuperation and not to beat myself up about it.

Try some physical exercise - lifting heavy objects over and over. I assume you have a holiday shutdown coming and will have enough time to get into a routine. Your physical situation will improve your mental situation. Busy season sucks and there is still a ways to go. Good luck.

You can try a meditation retreat if you can take time off. Consumption of media isn't leisure, I take concerta and have always had issues psychologically, this stuff helped me out a lot. You can also take up self therapy in the form of Gendlins focusing, there are people you can do a weekly session with. This form of therapy is not verbal where you talk for hours about your problems and is extremely effective.

Jordan Peterson who's a very competent clinical psychologist recommended quarterly vacations as they help stave burnout in the long term. I wish you well, I suffered from stress back in 2019 as I'd spent years in cram schools and have mild stomach issues because of stress accumulated at that time. Meditation and Concerta have halped a lot so far.

There is a motte user who helps people out with similar issues but I'm not sure if it's right to mention this as it might come off as me shilling something for someone. I wish you the best.

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.

Is this your introduction to buy here pay here dealers? They pooped up after cash for clunkers killed the supply of low end cash cars satellite location made repos cheaper and easier than before.

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.

Did they get into trouble for anything here? Seems fairly sensible tbh..

Technocats tend to hate how credit based services get delivered to those with really bad credit and use the government to harass them.

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.

How many man-years were spent on this case between everyone involved?

The saddest tragedy of the IRS is how it wastes such a massive amount of everyone's time on an activity that is among the most painful and boring possible.

After ditching several accountants for making mistakes, I do my own taxes now. My business is much simpler than this car dealer's. And yet, I spend on the order of 50-100 hours a year on taxes and other government bullshit. I hate every moment of it.

It boggles my mind that there are people, millions of people, who do this full time. What a horrible waste.

The negative externalities of our tax system are enormous. Imagine if the government forced everyone in the country to sit in a dentist's chair getting their teeth picked at for 10-20 hours a year. That's the level of pain we're talking about here.

fwiw, blame Congress (and the tax preparation industry), not the IRS. The IRS has asked Congress for years to simplify the tax code (and made suggestions about how it could be done). Congress chooses to make it complex, and guess which industry is opposed to making it less so?

I haven't read Graeber's Bullshit Jobs so I don't know if this is what he had in mind, but at least in my head canon the US tax preparation industry is certainly up there when it comes to bullshit jobs.

My business is much simpler than this car dealer's. And yet, I spend on the order of 50-100 hours a year on taxes and other government bullshit. I hate every moment of it.

It boggles my mind that there are people, millions of people, who do this full time. What a horrible waste.

I do this full time (don't worry, it's not too bad, it's only endless pain and suffering) and I endorse the sentiment in your comment wholeheartedly. Ideally tax should be easy, but it's prone to accrete over time and increase in complexity as politicians play political football, and in addition there are a massive amount of anti-evasion mechanisms in the tax code in order to try and cover up every loophole as they're discovered, like trying to plug a pipe that keeps springing leaks. The legislation inevitably becomes an unwieldy, incoherent mess that most people would give their left testicle never to look at again.

In addition, tax collectors' incentives are so ridiculously misaligned with that of the rest of the public that it's often farcical. Their leniency or harshness is highly dependent on their revenue collection targets at any given point, their audits can be capricious and arbitrary, and in cases of conflict between the tax office and a business (I have actually seen this before) they'll try to wear said business out through attrition and limit the avenues for appeal. Contesting them in court is difficult because they have a practically endless reserve of public money to fight you, and if you're a small business lacking knowledge of the intricacies of taxation law and accounting, your best course of action is to submit to the terms of the tax office. The whole thing is fucked beyond belief.

If you haven't read The Pale King, it may be consoling. Or infuriating, it could go either way.

As I understand it, one problem is that in our modern, (relatively) light touch economy*, fiddling with tax incentives is one of the government’s favourite ways to incentivise or disincentive things. Want to incentivise children? Then why not say that people have to pay 20% less VAT on a car purchase when they provide proof they’ve bought a child seat (so as not to be seen unfairly penalising the childless). Or the endless bickering about charitable offsets. Half the loopholes are there on purpose and the other half arise from the constant attempts to give out pork.

*As opposed to medieval monarchies or autocracies where people are comfortable giving orders.

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