I remember a CBS article from decades ago. CBS submitted the same tax information to something like nine entities, including the IRS. One or two of them got it right. The IRS was NOT one that got it right.
The law is so complicated that the Ultimate Authority can't get it right?!
What are the Preparers' civil and criminal liabilities for getting it wrong?
What are the liabilities if it is true that the Amendment authorizing the Income Tax was not legally ratified? There are claims enforcement of the Income Tax is a felony committed under "color of law".
Would that make tax preparation "aiding and abetting"?
If my sources are correct, only taxpayers are liable for income tax. The definition of a Taxpayer is anyone who signs a 1040 Form and/or anyone with income from outside the United States.
It's been taken to court. The defendant said, "I'm happy to pay, just show me the regulations where it says I owe." He said show me the links of the law between the Constitution the statute that says I owe. The government ignored what his request. The jury did not.
The foreman of that jury spoke to the National Press Club ... forty years-ago? Marsha Brooks(?) was her name, I think. She explained how the jury decided that juries were there to enforce the law; the defendant made a reasonable request; the prosecutors ignored it. Repeated requests to the judge for a copy of the law or just the statute number of the law, got nothing from the Court except "You have the information necessary for making a decision."
They acquitted.
Government did not appeal.
The video of the speech to the National Press Club is, however, no longer available easily available. It used to be a quality recording.
The last time I found it is only available from Russia... excuse me... Muscovy, and the recording quality sucked.
No thank you. Please do. I'd love it if someone did. But I want nothing to do with.
(LOL (but softly). A GOOD open source tax preparation program sounds like an excellent project for Muscovian hackers; so rife with irreconcilable mores - to exercise the American freedom of speech for the purpose of weakening the American Government by helping the American People to understand and exercise rights that would get a Muscovite poisoned, imprisoned, or disappeared. Wow.)
The only reason to buy a home is because you want it. It should be a joint decision; what does the wife think?
A home is not an investment, it is a liability. The "American dream" makes money for speculators, realtors, advertisers, builders, decorators, landscapers, lenders, insurance companies, and taxing entities. Homeowners may breakeven if they keep it for thirty years. They can actually make money if they were really lucky in their choice of "location, location, location." But that's gambling, not investing.
Read "Your Engineered House" by Rex Roberts. Avoid the updated version; get the original, 1964 version. Then read Ken Kern's "The Owner Built Home." Roberts deals with houses as machines; What do they do for us that make us need or want them? Both books deal with buying a house with sweat equity. Roberts points out that half the cost of a house is labor. (If you build it yourself you can have twice the house for the same money.) But half the materials cost comes from fixtures: doors, windows, cabinets, etc; things that other people make for retail. We buy them ready-made because ... builders get a kickback (discount); because they are advertised in "Better" Homes and Gardens; because we don't know that we can DIY-build better for a quarter the cost.
A rental house is an investment. Keep it until the loan is retired and you have an income-stream.
Building your own home is the same as buying it for twenty-five cents on the dollar ... and that IS an investment.
Always remember the Rule of 72 - "Seventy-two divided by the interest rate yields the years required for your investment to double." Don't forget to subtract the inflation rate from the interest rate. The point is that if you can live on half your income and invest the other half at 10% interest (after inflation), then you can retire on half your income after seven-point-two years. When you are thinking about a major expenditure, think about it in terms of the Rule of 72 and your eventual retirement.
...Do you see a therapist because you have difficulty distinguishing between what YOU want and what self-interested others tell you that you SHOULD want?
Greenhouse gardening. It always has stuff coming up.
I tried to write that in a humorous manner, but farmers are going broke while their suppliers prosper. A hundred years ago 98% of us were farmers and gardeners. Today only 2% of us are. The pyramid has inverted and we are in peril.
I had a lead carpenter with thirty years experience who quit when he discovered he could make more money selling homemade cookies at the local farmer's market.
On TED talks, Allan Savory promotes intensive rotational grazing as a proven means of reversing desertification. He observes that grass and herbivores and predators co-evolved. If you remove the predators, the herbivores thrive until the grass is gone. He shows a photo of adjacent parcels of land. One photo is of bare ground, dry stream bed, and leafless trees; The other photo is of running water, tall grass, brush and trees. The difference between parcels is attributed to managing grazing as if the predators were still there.
A third of Earth's land is desert. Alfalfa produces roughly ten tons per acre or 6400 tons per square mile. There are about 65 million square miles of desert. If 20 million square miles could be "greened" that would represent 128 billion tons of carbon per year removed from the atmosphere. Side effects would be healthier animals, higher quality food, and increased land area suitable for habitation.
In 2019 about 43 billion tons of CO2 were released into the atmosphere. Planting a third of the deserts to alfalfa would remove three times that annually.
Posit: We know how to cleanse the atmosphere.
Question: How do we make it happen?
Proposed: Revive the Homestead Act. Give people 160 acres of trash-land if they will make it grow. (A flaw in the original Homestead Act was the requirement that people live on their homestead. We should not require that, but I imagine people will want to settle on their homesteads once greened.)
Water is a necessary part of this plan.
Airwells are cold spots that condense water from air absent the conditions for rain or fog – if you’ve got dew spots on your windshield, you’ve got an airwell. Grass that condenses dew, is an air well. Basements that are moldy might be an airwell.
History and archaeology tell us that man-made airwells have been around for a long time. They come in many styles and have many names. Byzantine Rockpile, Crusader Siege Pond, Dew Pond, Ship Pond, Cloud Pond, Russell Dew Reservoir, Gravel Mulch, Herodotus’ Persian Palace Spring, WaterSeer…
I’m not interested in any version of an airwell that uses fuel. The ones I’ve named are all passive with the exception of the Siege Pond which benefits from a little muscle twice a day.
With $20k I’d build a Neolithic air well because I’m pretty confident it will work. With $200k I’d build them all to compare how well they work. Give me $2M and I’d build of each style in every state, because we need to know how each style performs in different environments.
Given water and free land as an economic incentive to grow grass, we can cleanse the atmosphere.
I am confident I can make a Neolithic Dew Pond the old way, with grass and clay and rocks. Would it work the same if built of foam-board and concrete? To be determined.
We know that low mass air wells work because we can see them work and we can buy the book “Dew Harvest.” Low mass devices do work but their production is not agriculturally and economically significant; Production is about five liters per day and seasonal.
According to the literature an eight hundred square-food Neolithic Dew Pond produces 660 gallons per day. That is a little less than three-quarters of an acre-foot per year.
Three-quarter acre-foot of water is agriculturally significant.
Economic significance depends on capital cost and productivity in diverse climates. Give me the $2M and I’ll find out if they can be made economically significant.
PS: States and companies which have bet on “scarce water” would be hurt by a thriving airwell industry.
PSS: If airwells become as common as they once were, manufacturers of home water-purification equipment will prosper.
Each skull contains a brain subdivided. One part of it counts. One part of it beats the heart. One part of it speaks. One part of it writes. One part of it listens. Communication between the parts is ... limited.
Each sub-brain loves its its own way.
How can you understand what you cannot articulate?
And how can you articulate ... feelings ... for a part of the brain that has no words?
When you talk about colors we can point and compare, decide to agree on what a word means, then use that word-meaning-a-certain-color to share other concepts. This is impossible ... well, this is very difficult when speaking about love.
We cannot point at an emotion and debate if what I feel is what you feel.
Love has different meanings in different contexts, different times, different ages, different parts of the brain. Even when we do communicate, seven-eighths of our message impinges on sub-brains to which words are meaningless.
OK, I'm answering the wrong question. "Can you UNDERSTAND the power of love?"
The the thing that makes us greater than the sum of our parts is our ability to communicate; We feel pain when we read about the earthquake in Haiti because of how words communicate to us the horror felt by others. The words change us, spur is to take action.
Anything that undermines language's ability to unit humanity is to be frowned upon.
Yes, language changes.
In the Koreas, the word for "wife" in one country is the word for "slave" in the other country. And that is why the two Koreas will never be one. They are truly divided by a common language. Both countries encourage "proper" word use. One is less successful than the other. The country whose people are not starving is the one with more words. The one with more communicable concepts. The one that is less successful at censorship.
Fox "News" is dividing the US. They don't add new concepts, they undermine the old. They make us wonder if what we heard is what was meant. They leave us with fewer useful words. (Starting with the word "news.")
"Hugops" ...I had to Google it. But that was because it is an example of a new word, new concept, a "jargon" coming onto radar. It undermines nothing. (Good show, that man. #hugops)
Will taking carbon out of the atmosphere suffice if we don’t also stop putting carbon into the atmosphere? We need a way of recycling carbon on human time scales, not geologic time scales. We need a way of converting six-billion polluters into six-billion obsessive cleaner-uppers.
Thermal depolymerization deployed on a homeowner scale, might fill that need.
Instead of making monthly payments to the gas and electric utilities, homeowners could gather trash, recycle food waste, and recycle unwanted, broken, or obsolete possessions to produce their own energy. Surplus production would become an income source; something to be sold utilities for transport to factories for production of new products. Right now this is science fiction but thermal depolymerization research suggests that we could make oil pipelines run backwards;
Previous attempts to burn garbage for energy have failed because the energy output of trash was entirely consumed by the need to dry garbage before it will burn.
Researchers have demonstrated a process for turning carbon-based trash into "sweet Texas crude" while generating an energy surplus. Instead of drying the garbage stream, they added water, then pressure cooked it. There were four outputs streams: inorganics, steam (used for preheating), methane (used to cook the next batch), and low-sulfur, light-weight crude oil. Since the process accepts all carbon-base materials, no sorting is necessary.
Our shelters, farms, industrial production, transportation, and communication systems are all dependent upon some form of burning carbon. How many decades will it take to redesign those processes and retire all of those vehicles and structures? Can it be done quick enough to save us?
Depolymerization might be a way of retrofitting houses to produce their own energy until their end-of-life.
Imagine a world where a homeowner's computing, cooking, heating, A/C, and personal transportation are powered by an input stream of organic waste. "Mom, can I go outside and look for trash? I want to play Fortnight." Thermal depolymerization could turn beach trash, micro-plastics, storm damage, and food waste into comfort, convenience, and income. Much better than a government mandated “return deposit” or voluntary “recycling” industry that recycles only 9% of what it collects.
If no other benefit accrued, home power production would save on transmission losses. Pipelines might be repurposed for collecting oil from household reactors and selling it to industry for production of new products.
By making plastic waste valuable, we could get it off our beaches, out of oceans, and out of our food chain.
(Imagine forests that won’t burn because gangs sneak into forests at night to steal fallen branches and dead animals. Or public toilets that pay depositors by the ounce. Taxes might be paid in oil produced in every garage. (Fantasy. Pure fantasy.))
It's complicated. The thing to remember is that successful cultures don't throw away elements that work(ed). The same way our genes are 90% to 99% "junk" our cultures are full of assimilated, dormant beliefs, myths, legends, traditions, children's stories. I think masks are with us forever. They will become more fashion-statement, like a bow tie, but they are now a part of us. Get used to it. We are going to see more Luddite, technophobe splinter-groups. This is a backlash against manipulation. In any argument, he who defines the terms wins. In a connected world, those with the best surveillance get to define the terms so they win. Splinter cultures using religious-fueled techno-phobia-as-a-shield-against-reason will create oases of resistance to globalization. Transportation is already in trouble. That means food can't get to where it is needed. Food is like money - beneficial if spread around, but when too much collects in one place it begins to stink. Producers and consumers are symbiots - neither can survive without the other. Victory gardens will come back into vogue. Globalization is now a Chinese emphasis so they are going to win. China doesn't need the rest of the world - they can be their own best market. Western culture is a threat to their oligarchy but western culture is necessary as a technology incubator. The west is going to find itself living in a reservation, a wild-life preserve of an otherwise Chinese world. Climate change (human caused or natural) is going to disrupt trade causing the human population bubble to implode. This will take more than 12 months, but the avalanche has started and we are just along for the ride. China's asset (endless manpower) is also their vulnerability. The question is which will come first - the computer virus that ends domestic control of ideas, or the organic virus that "if it kills one it kills all." The good news is that we are not doomed to death; We are doomed to be different than we were. "It is nice to remember in times like these that there have always been times like these."
I don't agree with all you say but you do write well. And I don't read to be agreed with; I read to learn the errors of my way. There are many many writer groups and they are cheap to join. The trick to writing is to write, which you clearly do. The second trick to writing is to quit caring what others think; if you write to speak truth to yourself, others will read it. The previous post did not sound like sarcasm to me, so you may have a little self-confidence problem. A writer's group will help you with that. They can also teach you how to market your product ... but real writers write because they must, not for the external rewards. You were not being overly melodramatic; you were speaking truth. Others can like it or not, but they can't tell you that you are "wrong."
Your clear strength (as I see it) is that you think in nerd but don't need a translator to be able to speak to civilians. That is a gift. It would serve you well if you opened a small computer store. It will serve you well if you choose to write.
Join the military; Afterward everything will seem cool as long as no one is shooting at you. Apply to DARPA or some other "skunkworks." Take a survival class; Few people know how little it actually takes to survive, but knowing you can survive with just what is in your head relieves a huge amount of stress. Go private and start a small computer business; helping others makes life seem worthwhile. Start a "hip pocket" business such as upholstering, writing, wood carving, truck farming; it gives you a fall-back skill and the physical work combined with the completely different mind-set required by that work may cure your burn-out from coding. Your third point is poorly phrased; I would say that you can't "have it your way" while working for others.
How would we know? A friend in hospital with blood clots in both lungs is tested for everything EXCEPT Covid-19. Having eliminated everything they can test for, they shrug their shoulders and send her home. EDIT: I live in small-town, western USA.
I remember a CBS article from decades ago. CBS submitted the same tax information to something like nine entities, including the IRS. One or two of them got it right. The IRS was NOT one that got it right.
The law is so complicated that the Ultimate Authority can't get it right?!
What are the Preparers' civil and criminal liabilities for getting it wrong?
What are the liabilities if it is true that the Amendment authorizing the Income Tax was not legally ratified? There are claims enforcement of the Income Tax is a felony committed under "color of law".
Would that make tax preparation "aiding and abetting"?
If my sources are correct, only taxpayers are liable for income tax. The definition of a Taxpayer is anyone who signs a 1040 Form and/or anyone with income from outside the United States.
It's been taken to court. The defendant said, "I'm happy to pay, just show me the regulations where it says I owe." He said show me the links of the law between the Constitution the statute that says I owe. The government ignored what his request. The jury did not.
The foreman of that jury spoke to the National Press Club ... forty years-ago? Marsha Brooks(?) was her name, I think. She explained how the jury decided that juries were there to enforce the law; the defendant made a reasonable request; the prosecutors ignored it. Repeated requests to the judge for a copy of the law or just the statute number of the law, got nothing from the Court except "You have the information necessary for making a decision."
They acquitted.
Government did not appeal.
The video of the speech to the National Press Club is, however, no longer available easily available. It used to be a quality recording.
The last time I found it is only available from Russia... excuse me... Muscovy, and the recording quality sucked.
No thank you. Please do. I'd love it if someone did. But I want nothing to do with.
(LOL (but softly). A GOOD open source tax preparation program sounds like an excellent project for Muscovian hackers; so rife with irreconcilable mores - to exercise the American freedom of speech for the purpose of weakening the American Government by helping the American People to understand and exercise rights that would get a Muscovite poisoned, imprisoned, or disappeared. Wow.)
Someone should write a book about this.
Oh, Red Benson already did. https://thelawthatneverwas.com/