If you can actually lift that cup to your mouth and take a sip without dumping it on yourself, then you deserve every drop of delicious coffee inside it. Between the weight training exercise and the manual dexterity required, I really couldn’t begrudge you anything.
Re knitting: I still regret not taking lacemaking lessons from my aunt, who was old enough to know the art. While knitting was a fun thing for a boy to learn and mess with the heads of my sisters, lace would have been way more effective.
On 4k RAM, I remember struggling to fit an OS loader into 320 words of memory. Eventually I got some help from THC to trim 5 words and make it fit.
Internet singles? ROFL. Yeah, right. There’s a reason why I don’t believe in aliens until I actually meet one.
Don’t let the cat out? I was thinking more along the lines of, “Vampires NOT invited.” (That includes tax collectors.)
Mud season. Welcome to NH in spring.
Uh oh. The opening scene of half the horror movies ever produced.
The opposite of suicide? Redemption?
Ahem. I may be dating myself, but the Brady Bunch? Hollywood Squares.
Spin the bottle was fun. So was Truth, Dare or Consequences.
Hakeem Jeffries, et a? It’s called insider trading legislating.
Why should the decision to get vaccinated be any different than any other medical decision? Only get vaccinated if you figure the risk is lower that way. However, it does require you to do some research and serious thinking.
Evil? What poor town has those three leftists on their select board?
Take one for the team? Are small business corporations considered small caps?
Hey Lefty, watch that first step.
I think the best time to hit the dam for maximum damage would be at flood crest from a major typhoon. Just remember that there are 20,000 military age Chinese men illegally in this country with totally unfettered access to every bit of our national infrastructure, thanks to the Biden Administration and the Democrat Party.
You know, I say the same thing about Jewish people who support the Democrat Party.
For the same reason we don’t let 600 lbs pigs sleep in bed with us.
The Trump Jump? I find myself disturbing looking forward to it. Not because I relish the thought of a million people killing themselves, but at the fascination over a million humans acting like small rodents.
The problem with this meme is that the cast of The View are all leftists, not RINOs.
It could depend on which face of the dam was targeted. Near the top of the dry face might cause enough of a breach to have, shall we say, a cascading effect on the rest of the structure.
I know, for an odd, this meme is conflicting. On the other hand, we aren’t demanding the rest of the world conform to our vision beyond just leaving us alone.
Somewhere on an archive of (purportedly full transcripts and/or videos of) Presidential Addresses–IIRC, it’s maintained by a university in some Virginia or other–there is Brandon’s speech from the red-lit maw of Independence Hall.
I sat through that video shortly after he delivered it, just to savor again that moment when he ad-libbed that bit about our puny weapons being no match for his mighty F-16s.
Also, why can the IRS decide that you didn’t pay enough taxes 7 years ago and come after you for the difference, but you only have 3 years to discover you shorted yourself on that refund you should have claimed? Shouldn’t both parties have the same time frame?
I had a rare(?) positive experience with this year’s tax return. First, I switched to eFile (I don’t do Windows, so did the form based one instead of TerribleTax) and it caught a minor glitch–forgot to fill out a non-critical value. Fine. Corrected in a few minutes and it was happy.
A couple weeks later, I got a check from them. Didn’t expect one, so WTF? Going through the records, last year I put $X3XX worth of refund into estimated taxes. I had a brain-bobble and claimed $X0XX, so my fault. I was impressed that they a) processed it so fast, and b) paid up right away.
We’ve done efile with feds (TurboTax) for a few years now. Was shocked how fast the refund came back. State we snail file, that refund took a bit. What is surprising is son’s snail mail filing and associated check is taking a bit. Normally the check is cashed before the green “it got there” slip arrives back.
Assuming the green card showed up, it’s still not surprising. This was the first year I did state efile, partly because snail mail returns took forever, and they had an unfortunate tendency to ignore the 1040 copy I included, and dinging me “because you didn’t send the form”. I wanted to staple or paperclip them together, but That’s Not Allowed, so the last couple years of snailfile I did a cover letter. Seemed to work, but it got put in the really slow queue. (Our income was somewhat unpredictable, so refunds happened.)
We always staple the return together. Also stable the 1040’s, except SS, even though the forms explicitly state not to. Didn’t one year and got a letter stating they required them. Whatever.
Hubby has the state withholding set as low as allowed for his pension (which isn’t that much), and what we withdrawal from our IRS’s. No withholding on my pension, nor on our SS. You’d think we’d owe the state a bundle. We don’t. Of coarse Oregon does not tax SS which helps. But our medical isn’t that much of an extra deduction. We get a bundle back from the state. Short of not withholding anything, and estimating taxes every quarter, which neither of us want to do, that isn’t going to change. Our normal pattern in the past has been to get enough back from the state to pay the feds, or enough back from the feds to pay the state. Now we get refunds from both. What change? Our end? Absolutely nothing.
I had to fix an issue from 2021 and sent them the final papers about two weeks ago. The refund is being deposited this Wednesday. I would just like to have been able to fix the stuff from 2020 which would have gotten us about $4K in extra refund. We only recently discovered that my daughter counts as disabled as far as EIC is concerned (and has for years), and given the mess things were during the covidiocy as well as my current out-of-work-for-months-with-a-concussion, we could use as much money as possible. I’ve also had them fix errors where I thought I owed them more money and I was actually due a refund.
I’ve generally found the front line folks to be very friendly and helpful. The issues seem to be further up the line, especially at the policy-setting and enforcing level.
Also, why can the IRS decide that you didn’t pay enough taxes 7 years ago and come after you for the difference, but you only have 3 years to discover you shorted yourself on that refund you should have claimed? Shouldn’t both parties have the same time frame?
This harkens back to a time when people with college degrees could safely be assumed not to be uneducated. We are now at the point where the correlation is close to zero, and in some areas may be negative. (The terrifying part is that the Ivy League is the most prominent of those areas.)
Thomas Sowell is not yet as quotable as Winston Churchill, but he is closing the gap.
There is a Yoo-Toober called KeroNGB going around to college campuses with a microphone duct-taped to a wooden spatula, asking college students such profound questions as:
If you had $100 and spent 76% of it, how much would you have left?
What is 3 cubed? 3 times 3 times 3? 9 plus 9 plus 9?
What is 1 million minus 1?
What does an acre measure?
If you had been born 7 years ago, how old would you be now?
How often are leap years? What is a leap year? Which month changes?
If it’s 3:33, how long until 4:00?
How long is a quarter of an hour?
What is the 3rd planet from the sun?
…and 95% of them can’t get even one right answer. Maybe 1 in 100 can get more than one right. These are COLLEGE STUDENTS!! And they VOTE! And protest!
Are you certain that 95% can’t give one right answer? Or is it 95% of the ones he chooses to put up? (Either because he’s deliberately cherry-picking, or because seeing people who give all the right answers is boring).
I’m not saying our high schools are doing a great job, but I’d want to see an actual survey (with all results pubished) as opposed to videos, where we don’t know how many minutes or hours of footage get cut, before I conclude anything about actual numbers.
I agree the video is likely cherry-picked but, frankly, if even one student enrolled in college cannot answer those questions there is an obvious problem.
Yes a function of that. But reality is there is no Chocolate Milk without milk. While the chocolate doesn’t come from cows, the majority portion – milk – does. The question is faulty.
Me? My answer would be either “Idiot”, “Go away”, or “Milk component yes. Chocolate component no.” Depending on mood.
Yes I would be a lawyer’s nightmare on the stand. Either I define the question properly, or as them to “define” their question.
Pretty sure common trait with most programmers. We get burned every day with incorrect questions.
No one can say I don’t answer their questions. I do. They just get more information than they think they want.
Either way, these type of street surveys, I’d be edited out. If I hadn’t taken in the whole scene before entering it, and went “Oh. Hell. No. Avoid.”
I doubt I’ll ever be in this situation, but I’ve gamed it out in my mind. If I’m ever on the stand and asked one of those questions where the lawyer insists on a yes or no answer, but answering either yes or no would be misleading, I would say something like this: “Both yes and no would be false. I took an oath just now to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Turning to the judge: “Judge? Am I supposed to lie on the stand?” Then to the lawyer: “Because to say yes would be a lie, but to say no would also be a lie.” If the judge then insists on my answering yes or no, I would ask him, “Are you telling me I’m supposed to lie? No, of course you aren’t. Then please let me tell the truth.”
I might still end up being found in contempt of court, but I’d be polite to everyone except the lawyer, so I’d probably end up dodging that. And as I said, I’ll probably never be in that situation.
There’s also the phenomenon of people being unable to think when put on the spot, a subset (or would it be a superset?) of test anxiety. I could totally see a philosophy student, head full of trying to understand Kierkegaard, having a mental record-needle-scratch moment when suddenly asked a basic math question, and being unable to come up with the answer on the spur of the moment even though under normal circumstances he’d have no problem with it.
And/or some questions I could answer having them been given verbally to me. Some, no. Have to see them written down, or at least be able to visualize them.
What is hilarious is some of the questions one gets at a Medicare yearly visit. The cognitive test. Can I be given a list of items, then do something else, and then remember that list of items? Oh, heck maybe not. Not without repeating the list a lot, which interferes with the second two items. Truth be told doesn’t matter that I’m now 68, I couldn’t do this at 30. If I have a list of items, it gets written down. The fun one is drawing a clock face if it is 20 to 4:00. Sure lets see if anyone born past say 1985, let alone born since 2000, can do that first! Evil grin.
But it is a unit of volume! (OK, part of a unit of volume – an acre-foot of water covers one acre of land a foot deep. You can guess which profession developed the measurement.)
The pre-booked room in H-ll is so me. I was once declared “religion teacher most likely to be hit by lightning while standing in a church” by one class. At a church. I think they were serious, even though they were also laughing at my comments.
In college, in a required Theology 1 class, the instructor called me a heretic.
That’s OK; she later told us she had been pre-punished (my assignment of meaning, not hers). On her honeymoon, she and her husband became physical on the isolated dunes, in this nice three-clustered-leaves foliage.
They couldn’t touch each other for a couple of weeks.
I’ve always gone from extremely reactive to barely noticed for about 3 years, then bad reaction. I’ve seen people hospitalized because of it. Never that bad. But bad enough. Rinse and repeat. Which was how I was able to work in 3 leaf hillside central for 3 seasons … I was in the “safe immune” periods. Been so long since I’ve been out in the brush among it now that I am very very very careful to not let myself, the dog, or the cats, touch it. None around the house. But both Diamond Woods, Doris Ranch, Bueford Park, and outlying oak savanna foothills are covered with it, so not easy.
Get some jewelweed soap in case of emergency. Check the ingredients carefully, because some people throw an awful lot of extra ingredients into jewelweed soap.
That stuff works. Of course it’s preferable to avoid poison ivy/oak/sumac in the first place, but it’s good stuff. Even after the rash takes hold, you can still use it to make the rash go down.
Son unfortunately did not inherit this trait. He got my sensitivity.
Dendrology was fun. The plant was not put into plastic. FYI, the stems are just as bad. Oh, I didn’t have a problem. I know what the plant looks like with or without leaves. I know what the berries look like.
Back in HS years, couldn’t avoid it. There is a reason why Sheep Hill, southwest of Drain, is nicknamed Poison Oak Hill. Since we hunted it every year couldn’t avoid of the stuff. Last bad attack was Fall ’73.
While we were gone one summer our son was asked to clean off the roof of the grocery store where he worked. No one realized there was poison ivy up there. It spread to his torso and he got fairly sick. Credit to the store owner, they paid his doctor/medicine bill.
We do. I’m an amateur. There was a guy posting here that was a swordsmith that I recall, or it might have been on MGC. I just restore old axes and suchlike on occasion.
Naw. I have to think about it when the doc asks me how much 🍵do I drink a day. I make about 🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵. I drink, maybe 🍵 or 🍵🍵. Can’t stand cold or just barely warm coffee, so a lot of it gets tossed and I start over. Part of the problem is none of my 🍵 heel worth a darn so I can drink the 🍵in a timely manner.
Shrug. I have a proper container to keep coffee warm, or at least 20 oz’s. Tend to burn myself using it direct. When we travel, that is what I do, is take a travel mug to drink the coffee, but fill up the 20 oz with more. I have a Kurig mini. No large water reservoir, just enough for a single cup to make.
The playground meme… I keep going back and looking at it, because it looks almost exactly like the playground in my wife’s home town, where we took the kids while we were visiting her parents last month. Except that if it was that playground, given the angle the picture was taken, there should be some buildings in the background that aren’t there. Which means that that model of playground was built in multiple towns, probably lots of them all over America.
My wife confirms that it’s not the playground in her home town, just one remarkably like it with a few minor variations in layout. But that means that these playgrounds were built in small towns all over America.
Can confirm. Was one a bit like that in wee little Speck, Appalachia. From what I recollect, it was constructed because some old handyman saw something like it, and decided to make one for his kids. Only he asked to be able to do it in a public park. The town agreed.
There were two in my neck of the woods; one is still around. The other fell to arson (unfortunate side effect of being built with wood) and they had a lot of community input for the replacement, which is equally epic. But which has better sight lines, a comment I contributed.
They were both built in the mid-90s. I don’t quite remember if the one at my elementary school was like this, but that one was replaced long ago with one less tall.
Not the playground I grew up on. Everything was *metal, including the climbing structure of boxes that went up at least 4 first graders height (played tag in it, went vertical as well as horizontal at all levels, except automatically “it” if feet touched ground). The breaking down concrete block box, with concrete round tunnels (three first graders wide), we used to walk on top of the blocks (falling minimum scrapes/bruises to breaking something). The stacked concrete tunnels. Swings we jumped out of. Teeter Totters that went at least 3 first graders at highest (high enough that coming off at height had high percentage of something getting broke when landing. Some of the equipment even had sawdust chips under and around it, not all of it by any standard. We survived.
Not that cushioning helps preventing breaks. Son had a classmate who managed to break not one arm but both arms on the playground during recess. Of coarse he was playing on top of something that wasn’t meant to be played on top of (this never happens, sarcasm off – JIC). His mom swore she was going to get something for him to wear over clothing that stated both front and back “Schools Fault! D***** It!”
Almost all the playgrounds at schools of my youth, and many public park playgrounds, were decidedly “Brutalist” architecture. They had that “are you tough enough to survive -me-” vibe.
The IRS/ICE meme misunderstands the law and the Constitution.
The reason IRS has never shared information with DOJ or ICE is based in the fact that the Constitution prohibits forced self-incrimination. The IRS can collect tax on illegally gained but disclosed earnings but that information cannot be used in criminal proceedings (not reporting the income is another thing). This was debated and decided when the income tax was passed.
You & I haven’t seen the proposed agreement between IRS & ICE but I can’t see how it could helpful to ICE and still pass legal muster.
And the immigrants who are working and paying taxes are far less likely to be the ones we want to prioritize the deportation of.
Why should mere Constitutional considerations restrain an IRS that gets to presume us guilty of tax evasion, and requires us, at our own expense, to prove ourselves innocent?
No, but they can find out where a company is employing illegals who aren’t filing. The company that deducts employment expenses but not enough employee numbers filing to match the company deduction for payroll. Can then go after company and get names. Can’t use the information for prosecute for hiring illegals. If don’t cough up names then can go after illegally reporting deductions can prove had.
I can’t help but wonder if this is merely the case of ICE having the criminal information already at their fingerprints, and they now just need the IRS so they can get the latest addresses of them that are on file.
Speaking of IRS. I guess there was a rally today downtown Eugene to point out the ICE agents in town. Free speech and all. Interesting comments too. More than a few were deliberately misunderstanding the intent. As in “so we are there to help ICE identify the local illegals?” Not that the usual suspects allowed that and pushed back using the Nazi false narrative. Surprised the comment sections didn’t get shutdown.
I’m picturing some lonely twerp scrolling through OnlyFans, discovering the Domestic Skills channel, and watching for hours. Who knows — it might work!
Wow. I’d never have thought of that in 3.5. Amazing!
“Americans are going to have to eat their own cheese”. Right, try that again after you guys tried to copyright “cheddar cheese”. We love our own cheese! Cabot Alpine CHEDDAR, nom!
Understand the sublime beauty of the lose-lose situation James is in:
If she did in fact take up residency in her Virginia property, then she legally abandoned her position as New York Attorney General. This means she was ineligible to prosecute Trump at the time.
If she did not take up residency, as she claimed in her POA, then a case can be made that she committed fraud to gain more favorable real estate loan rates — the very crime she hung on Trump. “This would be particularly problematic for someone who has prosecuted others for similar misrepresentations in property matters,” Antar notes drily.
But it could be even worse than that for James: she may well have tripped federal wire fraud charges with this maneuver. These can carry a fine of up to $1 million and/or 30 years in the slammer.
And after James’s malicious prosecution of the president, the possibility of the Trump DOJ bringing her up on federal fraud charges is a prospect almost too exquisite to bear. If you care to mine for the irony there, I think you’ll find a rich vein.
Rick Cook’s Wiz Biz series as elements of tech support wizards.
The first book has a Systems Programmer kidnapped into a World of Magic where he creates a New Way of doing magic which is very similar to computer programming.
The second book has a group of Systems Programmers brought to the World of Magic to expand the first guy’s work (he’s been kidnapped).
It’s exactly like computer programming, modeled on Forth. Traditional wizards sneer at his ‘army-ant spells’ until they turn out to be much more versatile than rote magic, in which each spell does exactly one thing. If you want to invent a new spell, to do something that’s never been done before, you have to start from scratch and proceed by trial and error. Where ‘error’ can include disintegrating yourself.
According To Hoyt 
Sadly, despite the poster for the end of Trump’s second term, someday, the Ds will get back in control. Just hope it’s far in the future.
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The Reader is so living the Man of Mystery meme.
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Yup. I’m sure that I should be doing something right now, but can’t for the life of me remember WHAT!
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If you can actually lift that cup to your mouth and take a sip without dumping it on yourself, then you deserve every drop of delicious coffee inside it. Between the weight training exercise and the manual dexterity required, I really couldn’t begrudge you anything.
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That’s what straws are for.
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Have you ever tried to drink coffee (or other hot drinks) via straws????? [Evil Grin]
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Re knitting: I still regret not taking lacemaking lessons from my aunt, who was old enough to know the art. While knitting was a fun thing for a boy to learn and mess with the heads of my sisters, lace would have been way more effective.
On 4k RAM, I remember struggling to fit an OS loader into 320 words of memory. Eventually I got some help from THC to trim 5 words and make it fit.
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“Who would ever need more that 256kB of RAM?”
Bill Gates
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SFBS!
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Internet singles? ROFL. Yeah, right. There’s a reason why I don’t believe in aliens until I actually meet one.
Don’t let the cat out? I was thinking more along the lines of, “Vampires NOT invited.” (That includes tax collectors.)
Mud season. Welcome to NH in spring.
Uh oh. The opening scene of half the horror movies ever produced.
The opposite of suicide? Redemption?
Ahem. I may be dating myself, but the Brady Bunch? Hollywood Squares.
Spin the bottle was fun. So was Truth, Dare or Consequences.
Hakeem Jeffries, et a? It’s called insider trading legislating.
Why should the decision to get vaccinated be any different than any other medical decision? Only get vaccinated if you figure the risk is lower that way. However, it does require you to do some research and serious thinking.
Evil? What poor town has those three leftists on their select board?
Take one for the team? Are small business corporations considered small caps?
Hey Lefty, watch that first step.
I think the best time to hit the dam for maximum damage would be at flood crest from a major typhoon. Just remember that there are 20,000 military age Chinese men illegally in this country with totally unfettered access to every bit of our national infrastructure, thanks to the Biden Administration and the Democrat Party.
You know, I say the same thing about Jewish people who support the Democrat Party.
For the same reason we don’t let 600 lbs pigs sleep in bed with us.
The Trump Jump? I find myself disturbing looking forward to it. Not because I relish the thought of a million people killing themselves, but at the fascination over a million humans acting like small rodents.
The problem with this meme is that the cast of The View are all leftists, not RINOs.
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You. better have torpedo on that fast mover—a big one—or you wasted a trip.
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It could depend on which face of the dam was targeted. Near the top of the dry face might cause enough of a breach to have, shall we say, a cascading effect on the rest of the structure.
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The opposite of suicide is born again.
(grin)
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DING! DING! DING! We have a winner!
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Rhinos, Hippos, CenROOri, CenTAHHHHRI, tomato, toMAHHHHto.
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I know, for an odd, this meme is conflicting. On the other hand, we aren’t demanding the rest of the world conform to our vision beyond just leaving us alone.
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Somewhere on an archive of (purportedly full transcripts and/or videos of) Presidential Addresses–IIRC, it’s maintained by a university in some Virginia or other–there is Brandon’s speech from the red-lit maw of Independence Hall.
I sat through that video shortly after he delivered it, just to savor again that moment when he ad-libbed that bit about our puny weapons being no match for his mighty F-16s.
But Winston Smith beat me to it.
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Wanna bet?
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Yep. And if they already know the right number up front, why do we have to spend hours and money to do our taxes each year?
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Also, why can the IRS decide that you didn’t pay enough taxes 7 years ago and come after you for the difference, but you only have 3 years to discover you shorted yourself on that refund you should have claimed? Shouldn’t both parties have the same time frame?
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I had a rare(?) positive experience with this year’s tax return. First, I switched to eFile (I don’t do Windows, so did the form based one instead of TerribleTax) and it caught a minor glitch–forgot to fill out a non-critical value. Fine. Corrected in a few minutes and it was happy.
A couple weeks later, I got a check from them. Didn’t expect one, so WTF? Going through the records, last year I put $X3XX worth of refund into estimated taxes. I had a brain-bobble and claimed $X0XX, so my fault. I was impressed that they a) processed it so fast, and b) paid up right away.
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We’ve done efile with feds (TurboTax) for a few years now. Was shocked how fast the refund came back. State we snail file, that refund took a bit. What is surprising is son’s snail mail filing and associated check is taking a bit. Normally the check is cashed before the green “it got there” slip arrives back.
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Assuming the green card showed up, it’s still not surprising. This was the first year I did state efile, partly because snail mail returns took forever, and they had an unfortunate tendency to ignore the 1040 copy I included, and dinging me “because you didn’t send the form”. I wanted to staple or paperclip them together, but That’s Not Allowed, so the last couple years of snailfile I did a cover letter. Seemed to work, but it got put in the really slow queue. (Our income was somewhat unpredictable, so refunds happened.)
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We always staple the return together. Also stable the 1040’s, except SS, even though the forms explicitly state not to. Didn’t one year and got a letter stating they required them. Whatever.
Hubby has the state withholding set as low as allowed for his pension (which isn’t that much), and what we withdrawal from our IRS’s. No withholding on my pension, nor on our SS. You’d think we’d owe the state a bundle. We don’t. Of coarse Oregon does not tax SS which helps. But our medical isn’t that much of an extra deduction. We get a bundle back from the state. Short of not withholding anything, and estimating taxes every quarter, which neither of us want to do, that isn’t going to change. Our normal pattern in the past has been to get enough back from the state to pay the feds, or enough back from the feds to pay the state. Now we get refunds from both. What change? Our end? Absolutely nothing.
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I had to fix an issue from 2021 and sent them the final papers about two weeks ago. The refund is being deposited this Wednesday. I would just like to have been able to fix the stuff from 2020 which would have gotten us about $4K in extra refund. We only recently discovered that my daughter counts as disabled as far as EIC is concerned (and has for years), and given the mess things were during the covidiocy as well as my current out-of-work-for-months-with-a-concussion, we could use as much money as possible. I’ve also had them fix errors where I thought I owed them more money and I was actually due a refund.
I’ve generally found the front line folks to be very friendly and helpful. The issues seem to be further up the line, especially at the policy-setting and enforcing level.
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Also, why can the IRS decide that you didn’t pay enough taxes 7 years ago and come after you for the difference, but you only have 3 years to discover you shorted yourself on that refund you should have claimed? Shouldn’t both parties have the same time frame?
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This harkens back to a time when people with college degrees could safely be assumed not to be uneducated. We are now at the point where the correlation is close to zero, and in some areas may be negative. (The terrifying part is that the Ivy League is the most prominent of those areas.)
Thomas Sowell is not yet as quotable as Winston Churchill, but he is closing the gap.
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There is a Yoo-Toober called KeroNGB going around to college campuses with a microphone duct-taped to a wooden spatula, asking college students such profound questions as:
If you had $100 and spent 76% of it, how much would you have left?
What is 3 cubed? 3 times 3 times 3? 9 plus 9 plus 9?
What is 1 million minus 1?
What does an acre measure?
If you had been born 7 years ago, how old would you be now?
How often are leap years? What is a leap year? Which month changes?
If it’s 3:33, how long until 4:00?
How long is a quarter of an hour?
What is the 3rd planet from the sun?
…and 95% of them can’t get even one right answer. Maybe 1 in 100 can get more than one right. These are COLLEGE STUDENTS!! And they VOTE! And protest!
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Are you certain that 95% can’t give one right answer? Or is it 95% of the ones he chooses to put up? (Either because he’s deliberately cherry-picking, or because seeing people who give all the right answers is boring).
I’m not saying our high schools are doing a great job, but I’d want to see an actual survey (with all results pubished) as opposed to videos, where we don’t know how many minutes or hours of footage get cut, before I conclude anything about actual numbers.
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I agree the video is likely cherry-picked but, frankly, if even one student enrolled in college cannot answer those questions there is an obvious problem.
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Cannot, or did not. They’re not the same thing.
Even back in the ’80s, they were doing “does chocolate milk come from brown cows” surveys.
The group with the highest percent of “yes” was… dairy farmers.
Because if some entitled SOB is going to waste my time win insultingly stupid questions, fine. I’ll waste his right back.
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This is entirely by passing the known phenomena of paid actors.
“I’ll give you $20 buck to act like a complete idiot for 10 minutes. It’s for my youtube channel.”
or free pizza for content
or dozens of other options.
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Fair point. I might have trolled the guy, too
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(Loud. Weird accent)
“I have a red pencil -box- !”
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The more I think on it, the more I want to make really outrageous answers…..
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Yes a function of that. But reality is there is no Chocolate Milk without milk. While the chocolate doesn’t come from cows, the majority portion – milk – does. The question is faulty.
Me? My answer would be either “Idiot”, “Go away”, or “Milk component yes. Chocolate component no.” Depending on mood.
Yes I would be a lawyer’s nightmare on the stand. Either I define the question properly, or as them to “define” their question.
Pretty sure common trait with most programmers. We get burned every day with incorrect questions.
No one can say I don’t answer their questions. I do. They just get more information than they think they want.
Either way, these type of street surveys, I’d be edited out. If I hadn’t taken in the whole scene before entering it, and went “Oh. Hell. No. Avoid.”
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I doubt I’ll ever be in this situation, but I’ve gamed it out in my mind. If I’m ever on the stand and asked one of those questions where the lawyer insists on a yes or no answer, but answering either yes or no would be misleading, I would say something like this: “Both yes and no would be false. I took an oath just now to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Turning to the judge: “Judge? Am I supposed to lie on the stand?” Then to the lawyer: “Because to say yes would be a lie, but to say no would also be a lie.” If the judge then insists on my answering yes or no, I would ask him, “Are you telling me I’m supposed to lie? No, of course you aren’t. Then please let me tell the truth.”
I might still end up being found in contempt of court, but I’d be polite to everyone except the lawyer, so I’d probably end up dodging that. And as I said, I’ll probably never be in that situation.
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That’s usually what I do.
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There’s also the phenomenon of people being unable to think when put on the spot, a subset (or would it be a superset?) of test anxiety. I could totally see a philosophy student, head full of trying to understand Kierkegaard, having a mental record-needle-scratch moment when suddenly asked a basic math question, and being unable to come up with the answer on the spur of the moment even though under normal circumstances he’d have no problem with it.
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And/or some questions I could answer having them been given verbally to me. Some, no. Have to see them written down, or at least be able to visualize them.
What is hilarious is some of the questions one gets at a Medicare yearly visit. The cognitive test. Can I be given a list of items, then do something else, and then remember that list of items? Oh, heck maybe not. Not without repeating the list a lot, which interferes with the second two items. Truth be told doesn’t matter that I’m now 68, I couldn’t do this at 30. If I have a list of items, it gets written down. The fun one is drawing a clock face if it is 20 to 4:00. Sure lets see if anyone born past say 1985, let alone born since 2000, can do that first! Evil grin.
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This, too.
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If you ask people if the country is secretly ruled by lizardmen, you get a consistent single-digit level of “Yes” answers.
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Careful; our Hostess has been known to be part of that single digit… 🤔
Although she usually points out that it’s two single digits….
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Um. I’m only shocked at single digit
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https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Lizardman%27s_Constant
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Oh, lord, I CANNOT get my younger son to understand that an acre cannot be used as a DISTANCE measurement!!!!
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If you make a path 3 feet wide, and 1 acre in area, how many miles long is it? /grin
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2.75 miles long.
1 acre = 43,560 sq ft
Divided by 3 = 14,520 sq ft
Divided by 5280 (ft in a mile) = 2.75 miles
If I am wrong, I got it from a friend. ;-)
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Acre: unit of area
Acre-path: unit of distance roughly equivalent to old English league.
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What? Like a parsec?
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HAN
Fast ship? You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon?
BEN
Should I have?
HAN
It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs!
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Han [continuing]: That’s how tight the Falcon’s drive folds space! Even a dirty-foot desert rat like you knows that faster than light don’t work!”*
* Line cut from final edit.
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It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 1.2148E+18 feet!
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But it is a unit of volume! (OK, part of a unit of volume – an acre-foot of water covers one acre of land a foot deep. You can guess which profession developed the measurement.)
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Those who aren’t being paid think they have a shot at being paid.
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Someone has to lead, James. And sometimes it just takes one courageous man to inspire some courage in the rest.
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The neurodivergent love languages one explains so much…
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The April Showers one is way too true. Just took a look at my boots. If I wear them in the house, I die. It’s called a mudroom for a reason. Sigh.
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The pre-booked room in H-ll is so me. I was once declared “religion teacher most likely to be hit by lightning while standing in a church” by one class. At a church. I think they were serious, even though they were also laughing at my comments.
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In college, in a required Theology 1 class, the instructor called me a heretic.
That’s OK; she later told us she had been pre-punished (my assignment of meaning, not hers). On her honeymoon, she and her husband became physical on the isolated dunes, in this nice three-clustered-leaves foliage.
They couldn’t touch each other for a couple of weeks.
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Similar story came out of Pennsic years ago. Except the engaged couple wasn’t engaged.
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Um. Oh dear. Actually OMG, eek.
I’ve always gone from extremely reactive to barely noticed for about 3 years, then bad reaction. I’ve seen people hospitalized because of it. Never that bad. But bad enough. Rinse and repeat. Which was how I was able to work in 3 leaf hillside central for 3 seasons … I was in the “safe immune” periods. Been so long since I’ve been out in the brush among it now that I am very very very careful to not let myself, the dog, or the cats, touch it. None around the house. But both Diamond Woods, Doris Ranch, Bueford Park, and outlying oak savanna foothills are covered with it, so not easy.
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Get some jewelweed soap in case of emergency. Check the ingredients carefully, because some people throw an awful lot of extra ingredients into jewelweed soap.
That stuff works. Of course it’s preferable to avoid poison ivy/oak/sumac in the first place, but it’s good stuff. Even after the rash takes hold, you can still use it to make the rash go down.
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From many years at YMCA camp Kon-o-Kwee, learned to use, immediately, Fels Naptha Soap in case of exposure.
(no longer contains Naptha)
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My cousin “J” was immune to poison ivy/oak. He made BooCooBucks cleaning it out for others.
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So is hubby.
Son unfortunately did not inherit this trait. He got my sensitivity.
Dendrology was fun. The plant was not put into plastic. FYI, the stems are just as bad. Oh, I didn’t have a problem. I know what the plant looks like with or without leaves. I know what the berries look like.
Back in HS years, couldn’t avoid it. There is a reason why Sheep Hill, southwest of Drain, is nicknamed Poison Oak Hill. Since we hunted it every year couldn’t avoid of the stuff. Last bad attack was Fall ’73.
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My fellow 11B trainee at the Benning School for Bad Boys camouflaged himself with selected pickings of poison ivy.
oops.
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While we were gone one summer our son was asked to clean off the roof of the grocery store where he worked. No one realized there was poison ivy up there. It spread to his torso and he got fairly sick. Credit to the store owner, they paid his doctor/medicine bill.
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Sarah definitely needs a Carp Hammer! :-D
Do any Huns have a blacksmithing hobby?
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I’d bet on it. And I’d bet bigger that no Hun would have set the hammer’s face at that angle.
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We do. I’m an amateur. There was a guy posting here that was a swordsmith that I recall, or it might have been on MGC. I just restore old axes and suchlike on occasion.
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That IS a carp hammer. I did an image search on ‘wild carp leaping’ and…
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Not enough coffee. 🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵
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You just need a bigger cup…. Like mine. 8-)
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Naw. I have to think about it when the doc asks me how much 🍵do I drink a day. I make about 🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵. I drink, maybe 🍵 or 🍵🍵. Can’t stand cold or just barely warm coffee, so a lot of it gets tossed and I start over. Part of the problem is none of my 🍵 heel worth a darn so I can drink the 🍵in a timely manner.
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Pour the first cup, then put the rest in a $25 Wal-mart vacuum bottle flask.
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Shrug. I have a proper container to keep coffee warm, or at least 20 oz’s. Tend to burn myself using it direct. When we travel, that is what I do, is take a travel mug to drink the coffee, but fill up the 20 oz with more. I have a Kurig mini. No large water reservoir, just enough for a single cup to make.
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King Harv’s, right?
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“Now turn in the USAian Hymnal to page 100….”
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Love that even though I’ve seen it before. And setting it to Old Hundredth (One hellaciously old hymn) is just genius.
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Nice.
But, one little language prescriptivist tendency yet remains to me: “massive” is the quality of having mass.
If you want to say ‘big’, try
big
colossal
enormous
giant
gigantic
huge
great
monumental
humongous
sizable
grand
immense
super
astronomical
cosmic
elephantine
gargantuan
ginormous
grandiose
inordinate
lofty
mammoth
mighty
monster
monstrous
overgrown
oversized
prodigious
sizeable
tall
titanic
towering
tremendous
vast
astronomic
beefy
brawny
broad
brobdingnagian
Bunyanesque
burly
commodious
cosmical
cyclopean
extreme
formidable
galactic
Herculean
hulking
hulky
humungous
leviathan
mastodonic
monolithic
mountainous
pharaonic
powerful
staggering
stellar
strapping
stupendous
vasty
walloping
weighty
wide
capacious
liberal
roomy
spacious
thumping
appreciable
biggish
boxcar
jumbo
largish
oversize
solid
greater
larger
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[Roget’s Brontosaurus has entered the chat]
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🦕
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This. A perfectly composed shot, but did they use rhinos when so many horses would have been glad to do the job?
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P.S. WPDE!
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Not even a Clydesdale could meet that caboose specification…..
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Perhaps Hippopotami? They are River Horses after all.
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Hippopotami; that’s what I thought they WERE, but I was scanning through quickly.
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I’d have preferred bunch of jackasses, not horses. However, jackasses are males, so technically they’d be a herd of jenny asses.
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I just assumed they were hippos.
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^^^THAT^^^
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The playground meme… I keep going back and looking at it, because it looks almost exactly like the playground in my wife’s home town, where we took the kids while we were visiting her parents last month. Except that if it was that playground, given the angle the picture was taken, there should be some buildings in the background that aren’t there. Which means that that model of playground was built in multiple towns, probably lots of them all over America.
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My wife confirms that it’s not the playground in her home town, just one remarkably like it with a few minor variations in layout. But that means that these playgrounds were built in small towns all over America.
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Can confirm. Was one a bit like that in wee little Speck, Appalachia. From what I recollect, it was constructed because some old handyman saw something like it, and decided to make one for his kids. Only he asked to be able to do it in a public park. The town agreed.
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It looks just like the playground in Manitou Springs elementary where my kids attended in the 90s
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There were two in my neck of the woods; one is still around. The other fell to arson (unfortunate side effect of being built with wood) and they had a lot of community input for the replacement, which is equally epic. But which has better sight lines, a comment I contributed.
They were both built in the mid-90s. I don’t quite remember if the one at my elementary school was like this, but that one was replaced long ago with one less tall.
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Not the playground I grew up on. Everything was *metal, including the climbing structure of boxes that went up at least 4 first graders height (played tag in it, went vertical as well as horizontal at all levels, except automatically “it” if feet touched ground). The breaking down concrete block box, with concrete round tunnels (three first graders wide), we used to walk on top of the blocks (falling minimum scrapes/bruises to breaking something). The stacked concrete tunnels. Swings we jumped out of. Teeter Totters that went at least 3 first graders at highest (high enough that coming off at height had high percentage of something getting broke when landing. Some of the equipment even had sawdust chips under and around it, not all of it by any standard. We survived.
Not that cushioning helps preventing breaks. Son had a classmate who managed to break not one arm but both arms on the playground during recess. Of coarse he was playing on top of something that wasn’t meant to be played on top of (this never happens, sarcasm off – JIC). His mom swore she was going to get something for him to wear over clothing that stated both front and back “Schools Fault! D***** It!”
(*) Similar, just bigger.
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Almost all the playgrounds at schools of my youth, and many public park playgrounds, were decidedly “Brutalist” architecture. They had that “are you tough enough to survive -me-” vibe.
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Hmm. All the ones I see today are cheerful, safe, happy.
Maybe that is why so many kids are softies. Playtime isn’t hazardous enough.
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They also tend to be little used because the children don’t find them challenging enough.
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The Reader found these AI generated memes. He finds them interesting – and disconcerting. https://wilderwealthywise.com/what-if-a-i-drew-cartoons-about-itself/#comments
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This is so accurate, particularly given how the left is very vocally screaming for “death to the Jews”
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Set up a Jewish summer camp in the Carolinas. Immerse the kiddos in “good ol boy” backwoods southern culture.
Send home.
Watch eventual extinction-level event on nincompoops.
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Ever-true:
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i love Saturday meme mornings,,,,,
thank you for the chuckles, life is too damn serious at times
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The IRS/ICE meme misunderstands the law and the Constitution.
The reason IRS has never shared information with DOJ or ICE is based in the fact that the Constitution prohibits forced self-incrimination. The IRS can collect tax on illegally gained but disclosed earnings but that information cannot be used in criminal proceedings (not reporting the income is another thing). This was debated and decided when the income tax was passed.
You & I haven’t seen the proposed agreement between IRS & ICE but I can’t see how it could helpful to ICE and still pass legal muster.
And the immigrants who are working and paying taxes are far less likely to be the ones we want to prioritize the deportation of.
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Why should mere Constitutional considerations restrain an IRS that gets to presume us guilty of tax evasion, and requires us, at our own expense, to prove ourselves innocent?
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No, but they can find out where a company is employing illegals who aren’t filing. The company that deducts employment expenses but not enough employee numbers filing to match the company deduction for payroll. Can then go after company and get names. Can’t use the information for prosecute for hiring illegals. If don’t cough up names then can go after illegally reporting deductions can prove had.
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I can’t help but wonder if this is merely the case of ICE having the criminal information already at their fingerprints, and they now just need the IRS so they can get the latest addresses of them that are on file.
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Speaking of IRS. I guess there was a rally today downtown Eugene to point out the ICE agents in town. Free speech and all. Interesting comments too. More than a few were deliberately misunderstanding the intent. As in “so we are there to help ICE identify the local illegals?” Not that the usual suspects allowed that and pushed back using the Nazi false narrative. Surprised the comment sections didn’t get shutdown.
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But if an idiot steals my SSN to get a job, and doesn’t pay his taxes, it doesn’t matter that it’s obvious fraud, I’m still responsible.
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If we are issued SSNs, I want USS Pittsburgh.
(grin)
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oh, humor!
There is a WW2 diesel-electric boat USS Carp (SS-338).
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Let’s set up a GoFundMe to buy it for Sarah! :-D
She can replace the deck gun with a Carp-launching trebuchet.
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Alas, scrapped. Apparently the largest remaining chunk is the conning tower, placed in a park.
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I’m picturing some lonely twerp scrolling through OnlyFans, discovering the Domestic Skills channel, and watching for hours. Who knows — it might work!
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Honesty.
Old-person OnlyFans.
My life at 70 (75, actually).
Explain rune by rune.
Yep, I knew there was someone under my bed.
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How about the ones who are falsely filing for EITC? Or disability, welfare, etc. Or using those records to vote?
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Precisely.
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The Cat in the meme isn’t on the sign. That cat is mean.
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It’s Hubris.
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Hubris is in a very bad mood.
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Well, Hubris tends to be tragic.
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The Cat in the meme isn’t on the sign. That cat is mean.
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The eldritch ties of yore!
The doormat rocks.
Black widows like crevices like that, yes. Yeep!
What are you in for, indeed.
The GPS is SO wrong….
Wow. I’d never have thought of that in 3.5. Amazing!
“Americans are going to have to eat their own cheese”. Right, try that again after you guys tried to copyright “cheddar cheese”. We love our own cheese! Cabot Alpine CHEDDAR, nom!
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So…. memes are my shiny rock.
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NaNaNaNa
NaNaNaNa
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I have days when I have nothin’.
WPDE again?
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Deleted something so hard the key shattered. ^.^
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Wow, it even has the traditional mispeling, which is difficult for a meme with only two words.
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That spider isn’t jet black and shiny, but it could be the light. That scraggly web sure looks like a black widow’s. Fly swatter anyone?
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2 x 4, maybe. Or that carp hammer. The exoskeleton seems particularly robust on widows.
Maybe we can get Jamal Bowman to do the work there.
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That’s why you have your handy dandy picker upper. Can always use your cane as a backup as well.
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The “First Day on the Job” mime. Once at work a newbie asked how long I had been there. “Twenty-seven years, not counting the Federal time”.
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Hey, I found out that the song parodied by “It’s Sister Jenny’s Turn to Throw the Bomb” is “The Bomb Song” by The Raunch Hands.
I was totally floored. And there are Slavic orphans instead of Sixties anarchists.
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Hey, I found out that the song parodied by “It’s Sister Jenny’s Turn to Throw the Bomb” is “The Bomb Song” by The Raunch Hands.
I was totally floored. And there are Slavic orphans instead of Sixties anarchists.
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Fish’s tune is not quite the same, so I guess the folk process did occur.
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So you don’t like “Dollar Store Obama”, Hakeem?
How about “Temu Obama”? That work?
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And in the “Irony so thick you could forge it” department:
https://pjmedia.com/athena-thorne/2025/04/11/if-this-is-what-it-looks-like-nyag-letitia-james-is-in-a-world-of-trouble-n4938806
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Works for me.
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It does not seem to be on line anywhere, but I have a picture of a warning sign at the London Zoo showing a cartoon of a big piece of meat with legs.
Text says “This: [cartoon] is how our tigers see you!”
“DANGER Do not cross safety barriers.”
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Weirdly I knew that word, thanks to dad.
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By that definition, wouldn’t tsundoku be a verb? A “practice” is definitely not a noun.
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Vegans: people most likely to eat something while it’s still alive.
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On that ’16 GB RAM and 102% CPU’ meme — it’s more like “Firefox has a pop-up window open running Flash”
Flash is still the bane of the internet. FDE!!
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Its amazing how many Democrats have exactly $36 million net worth after X years in congress.
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I’d love to read a book about tech support wizards.
“a bad spell in yurt” is about as close as I’ve ever seen.
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Rick Cook’s Wiz Biz series as elements of tech support wizards.
The first book has a Systems Programmer kidnapped into a World of Magic where he creates a New Way of doing magic which is very similar to computer programming.
The second book has a group of Systems Programmers brought to the World of Magic to expand the first guy’s work (he’s been kidnapped).
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It’s exactly like computer programming, modeled on Forth. Traditional wizards sneer at his ‘army-ant spells’ until they turn out to be much more versatile than rote magic, in which each spell does exactly one thing. If you want to invent a new spell, to do something that’s never been done before, you have to start from scratch and proceed by trial and error. Where ‘error’ can include disintegrating yourself.
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