Civility and society are a social contract, if someone rips theirs up to free themselves from its restrictions, they also remove themselves from its protections.

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US bombs Mexico

Taxes levied by the US federal government are against individuals and businesses directly. States also levy their own taxes independently. So these funds paid to the federal government (largely) don’t go through state hands.

It’s a first person survival crafter with very strange science vibes.

Imagine you were a scientist on your first day at Black Mesa when Gordon caused the Lambda Incident (this is a Half-Life reference for those uninitiated) and in a kind of Subnautica style need to scrounge the environment for resources to research and crafted supplies and equipment to use to survive and explore further while encountering invaders as well as what are essentially SCPs or Objects of Power (Control/Alan Wake) throughout the facility and other environment all in the hopes of trying to escape with your life.

April had a content patch, 12 new subclasses and it enabled crossplay I believe.

From my 10 minutes spent on it, Interactive Brokers seems like the way I’d go for a long-term ETF style EU investment broker, and I’d run from Trade Republic based on a few negative experiences I just read about.

While they have an app, I see references to a desktop tool, as well as online, so I think that’d resolve your phone issue. Might be worth a look.

Saw a couple mentions to using their Irish entity, likely to do with tax benefits, not sure, should look into that more too.

I’m going to flip this a bit, do you only feel bad for just the “people who get pregnant who the anti abortion people affect”? Or do you actually feel bad for all the “people who the anti abortion people affect”, like doctors, those trying to use IVF, widowers or even the unwanted children, for example?

Rather than trying to use a more accurately specific term, I think using a more general term is likely easier and is probably more accurate.

Oh, don’t be fooled, they take some cuts out of the raw ticket sales too, not directly taxed, but something like 50+% of sales doesn’t go to the jackpot. Capitalism loves to take a cut everywhere it can, and it has been allowed to just run completely rampant here.

I wouldn’t say taxes in general are lower everywhere here, that was just the income tax comparison, there’s several other forms of taxes to pay, everywhere they can take a cut, except where the rich can bribe them not too of course.

I didn’t actually go do the math on it, looks like it’s accurately 37% to 50% (or thereabouts), I saw several EU countries listed around 53%-57%, so it can be pretty measurable, I guess.

Wendy’s is falling off a quality cliff unfortunately, while also driving up prices. Used to go there a lot, haven’t been in a while.

Gifts are from us, to parents/grandparents individually, everyone else as a couple if possible, else single.

A few of topics to cover here to explain it all: 1. Lottery Annuities, 2. Taxation 3. Wealth based Tax Avoidance.

For a lottery grand prize, the actual payout of the total is done via a multiple (30 in this case) payment yearly annuity, usually one that increases in size by a fixed amount (5% for this), where the total face value of the payments equals the winnings. If the winner took the annuity payout, they’d get like $25M today and more every year for 29 more years until they got about $100M, which would equal the jackpot. Alternatively, the lottery offers a “lump sum” payment, based on the value of the annuity (basically what it would cost today for someone to buy that stream of payments), which will be like half of the jackpot face value due to how compound interest works.

For taxes, any lottery payment is income and will be taxed accordingly by relevant entities, this will further reduce the take home amount by another 40%-60%.

For billionaires, they have wealth in the form of investment in the billions, not typically income. There are lots of loopholes here due to tax code complexity, but the 2 common examples are: long term investment tax and loans. If you’ve held any stock for at least a year, you only need to pay a reduced tax amount (this exists to incentivize stable participation in the stock market). Money you received from a loan is not income and is not taxed, lenders will allow you to secure your loan with investment holdings. There might be some additional trickery related to the cost basis used for payments of stock as compensation, I’m not looking into it. Basically, you can combine these into a process where you make large purchases or even day to day based on money from loans, and only pay those off using long-term investments, paying less income tax on your profit from them, which effectively reduces your tax burden. With massive holdings, you can turbo charge this, into what is essentially a ponzi scheme of loans, assuming interest on your investments is better than your loans (which will be lower because of your low risk to default).

Say you have $1B in mixed assets ($700M in long-term assets, $150M in each of short-term assets and cash), you want to buy a $100M house. You basically have 4 choices. Choice 1, pay with cash, you already paid taxes on it at whatever rate you did, but now it can’t earn you money by being invested. Choice 2, sell short-term holdings, you’ll pay taxes on your profits for this year as ordinary income, it also cannot earn more interest. Choice 3, sell long-term holdings, you pay reduced taxes on your profits for this year, it cannot earn more interest. Choice 4, purchase using a loan secured by your stock, you pay no taxes, you can continue to invest all your money which will earn more than the interest payments will cost on the loan. 4b, you take out loans to pay for your other loans, it’s basically always more profitable to keep your money invested and you never pay full tax on investment income if you need to use it.

Say you earn 7% interest in the stock market and loans charge 3.5% interest, a loan to buy the house, you take out 2 lines of credit (loans), you use the lines of credit to pay for the mortgage payments and each line of credit to make minimum payments on the other, and your investments appreciate. Averaged out, you “earn” 7M from your investments you didn’t sell, and accrue only about 3.5M or so additional debt, and pay no taxes on any of it. Each year, this repeats with larger numbers and profit growing faster than debt, you bought a house, you actually paid nothing, people will keep giving you loans so long as you keep having much more holdings than debt, ad infinum. This works until the stock market cracks in half and you earn less interest than debt accrued, but even then you just need to sell enough stock to max minimum payments, and only pay lower taxes on the profits until the market turns around. That’s more or less the extreme example.

More or less the same reason jury nullification exists, just concentrated on executive leadership. The problem isn’t that it exists, the problem is the bribery and ethical issues. Theoretically, if the executive is abusing the power, the legislature is supposed to remove them, but since we no longer operate in a system where that will happen… Here we are.

Sesame Street is great for exposure to a variety of types of people and some cultures. PBS in general is pretty good for that.

Bluey is fun for parents and kids, though it can give kids some high expectations from their parents.

Numberblocks is a good math concepts/counting show.

Storybots is a good learning about the world kind of show.

Paw Patrol has some life lesson kinds of things, but has more action/adventure stuff.

Aged like 21, working in a gas station convenience store register, man walks in, seems homeless and wasted, asked me to call 911 for him, says they’ll know him. Obviously not covered in the manual, but I figure that if someone asks you to call, you call.

I call, talking to the operator trying to explain… The dude just goes down like a sack of potatoes, whacks the top of his head on the counter, knocks over a couple of displays, and starts twitching on the floor. The operator got ALOT more compliant, EMTs picked the guy up (he was a frequent flier), he had a like 3in bump on his forehead that looked like a horn.

I cleaned up the store, trashed the food he damaged, bleached all the other stuff. Weird day.

CPAP, comes with a cell chip in it to relay data for the Dr to monitor/access. Cell chip stops working after 5 years.

Edit: Realized this could use more clarity. The cell plan for the chip expires after 5 years and cannot be renewed, meaning the entirely functional machine needs to be replaced or the Dr can’t properly monitor necessary vitals.

I just want to see some more exceptionalism from Flute Guy.

It’s not just that it means nothing, it’s that it exists as the implication of something or anything that can be used to identify with the in-group.

For the awareness of the elderly, 6-7 is starting to evolve, at least locally, into a call and response with the response to a 6-7 hand gesture being 8-9 with a kind of horizontal movement of vertical hands in a similar fashion. I’m unsure how local the trend is, it’s true origin, or if it will spread.

It’s interesting that to those not initiated into the call and response by peers will see knowledgeable non-peers providing the response as mocking or failing to understand the meme, thus further cementing it’s role as a tool as an in joke to the 6-7’er, despite them now being on the outside of the evolution of the joke, which is a wonderful contradiction.