Could you imagine if both of them just suddenly died of natural causes from old age in the same day before the election… like… the power vacuum would be wild.

So… I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t think this is quite right. Intent does matter in a criminal act, yes. This is called mens rea. It is the intent and knowledge to commit a criminal act, rather than just the action itself. For example, causing the death of another intentionally (without reasonable cause like self defense) is murder. Killing them unintentionally is only a crime if you were criminally negligent (which also includes knowledge and intent) and said negligence caused the death.

However, motivation is not the same as intent and a potentially unethical or political motivation to perform an otherwise legal action does not make the act illegal. Especially in the execution of the law. If your political rival commits a crime, even though you may care more about their political challenge then actual justice in that case, you still can and should execute the law exactly as you would for anyone else. The alternative would be to allow personal bias against the criminal to make them immune to the law, which can clearly not be the solution. So long as due process is followed, the law is impartial, and the trial is fair, it doesn’t matter what the motivation of the prosecution was. They are still subject to the law like anyone else.

I just had this same argument with my Father-In-Law a couple weeks ago about the Trump convictions. He said it was all politically motivated, so it was wrong. I said, maybe it was politically motivated, I don’t know. I can’t read the minds of dozens of people that I’ve never met before. But it doesn’t matter if it was or not, because Trump still committed the crimes, as was demonstrated before a jury, and he was given a fair trial like any other person was and found guilty by a jury his lawyers helped to select. What anyone’s hopes or reasons were are their own and completely inconsequential.

What? The fuck did my comment have to do with AI?

The problem isn’t (just) that this might hurt would-be theives. It’s that it harms indiscriminately for anyone that tries to lift the item. There are any number of reasons that someone may legally and in good faith try to lift your cooler. Including but not limited to:

-Your cooler fell off your boat, and someone was retrieving it for you.

-Someone thought you stole their cooler and they were lifting it up to look for identifying marks or a name/label/sticker to verify.

-They were a guest that you forgot to warn or who forgot the warning.

-They’re a law enforcement officer preforming a warranted search of your boat.

-They’re a first responder trying to move the cooler to make space to resuscitate someone.

And even if none of that were the case, defense of property must be reasonable and proportional, and never outways human life. Injuries like this can leave someone with permanent impairment to the use of and feeling in their hands. It can also be a serious risk of infection that can kill someone. None of that is acceptable just to protect your Yeti cooler, my dudes, particularly when less injurious means of protecting your property, like storing it, tethering it, or using technology like a trip switch, alarm, motion sensing lights or a camera are options as well. Is it OK to steal? No. It’s it okay to maim indiscriminately to prevent theft? Also no.

Exactly. RIP, George.

The idea of “the power of prayer” is stupid on the face of it. First, you’re presupposing a omnipotent diety that can and does directly effect the universe, changing the outcomes of events based on it’s desires, whims, plans, whatever. And you think THAT diety is taking requests? When “God answered my prayers”, you think that had you not requested it, it wouldn’t have happened. You think that God answers to your puny human concerns? That shit is arrogant as hell.

But furthermore, it also flies in the face of two other common beliefs about God, at least in Christianity. “God gave man Free Will” and “It’s All Part of God’s Plan™” (don’t get me started on how those are already two mutually exclusive ideas and hundreds of millions of believers just ignore that cognitive dissonance). Many of the things that one prays for, like “getting that job”, “winning that award”, “ending the war”, etc. directly involve altering the decisions and actions of others, which means that God would be stripping them of free will. Also, the most classic call to prayer is to heal the sick, or preserve one’s life. But surely if God has a plan for everyone’s life, at minimum everyone’s birth and death must also be planned. How can he answer your prayer to save your life if it’s his plan for you to die, yet still have an plan he’s always been following? The irony is that people like to pull the “all part of God’s plan” platitude particularly when someone has died before their time.

The one that really makes me annoyed, or even angry, is when something terrible happens, people are hurt or killed, and someone who was supposed to or had almost been there says something like “God was watching out for me”. It’s so self-centered and arrogant to attribute your simple dumb luck to God’s will in that situation. Because, not only does it assume you are God’s most special little guy that he’s constantly paying attention to and protecting, but also that God willfully condemned those others who did fall to this terrible fate that he supposedly saved you from. It’s all arrogance. I can’t stand it.

That was pretty clear. The apparent player character was a misdirect. The figure that comes in at the end seems to be the “her” referred to, and potentially the main antagonist of the game. I’m sure, just like in all other iterations, you’ll have a custom built player character of any sex/gender.

Well, yeah. If you’re self employed, you have to report yourself too.

A flat tax is a poor tax. 5% of your income means WAAAAY more to someone working minimum wage with two kids than someone who has a second home, even if dollars and cents it’s way less. And the wealthy will evade a flat tax as much as they already do a progressive tax.

?

It should also be noted that if the vast majority of people do nothing special on their taxes and just accept the government’s assessment, then that leaves a much smaller group of people to be audited. And a much larger portion of those people will be those who are trying to weasel their way out of paying their share. Right now, with the IRS being criminally underfunded, they only focus on low hanging fruit, the small fries. With those people being boiler plater auto-accepting tax payers, that would mean the IRS has no reason to audit them and can focus on the big boys where the real cheats are. That’s another big reason we do not have that sort of system and why the IRS is currently so underfunded (despite every dollar spent on the IRS generating between 5 and 9 dollars in revenue from tax fraud/evasion). Those kinds of people pay to make sure it doesn’t happen.

They should (and do?) have the same information your employer, bank, or brokerage files. i.e. the same forms you use to fill out your taxes now. They know what you contributed to you 401k and your other retirement accounts.

Right. Filing taxes should only be necessary if you have itemized writeoffs or wish to contest the IRS’s statement of your tax liability. They already know what you earned their your employer, what’s been paid in taxes, what basic credits your qualify for, etc. They know what you owe so long as you didn’t have expenses to apply for that they couldn’t assume or know about. The only reason they don’t already do that or, at least until now, have a free public system for filing, it’s because tax companies have lobbied for decades to be able to milk the public for cash to help them file and navigate their tax liability.

None of that is true. Nixon was never charged, let alone convicted of any crimes. And pardons can be completely general and not even specify an explicit crime at all. President Ford’s pardon of Nixon, for example, was for “all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974” So, no. Neither charges or convictions are required, nor even a crime at all.

That’s the only reason, I think, that he was able to “repeatedly” do it instead of being arrested after the first time. Cop was so impressed that he managed it, he let him off with a warning and a handshake. Once is cool. Twice is funny. Three times is getting annoying. Fourth time is kind of embarrassing to the officers at this point. And fifth time is too far.

Is this guy Tom Segura’s cousin, the inventor?

I agree with this. Correcting one’s grammatical error is fine. However, additionally, correcting one’s grammatical error as a means to disregard the content of the comment in an argument and/or deem their opinion or perspective false because of said error? Not fine and asinine.

Correct. But I’m sure their argument would be something to the effect that they wouldn’t reasonably be able to know what the former employee actuality disclosed to their competitor and would be even less likely to be able to prove it making the NDA unactionable and functionally useless in that case. That’s why they’d rather prevent you from working for the other company altogether to avoid that. Unfortunately for them, they’re just going to have to trust their former employees. Which probably also means they should treat them well so they’re not incentivized to fuck them over.

On one hand, businesses want to ensure that their investments in training and their corporate secrets are not walking out the door and into the hands of their competition. On the other hand, businesses can use other means to help mitigate that without removing the freedom of employment choice of their employees. You don’t get to require an agreement that effectively locks your employees to your business, especially when employees do not get guarantees of continued employment in return.

Imagine being laid off by your company and simultaneously being contractually restricted from seeking a similar position with another company. At best, you may need to move far away. At worst, you may need to find a completely new way to make a living. None of that was your fault or choice. You were obligated to sign the non-compete to get any job at all in your field. That’s the truth for millions.

Employers cannot hold all the cards.

What the hell do you mean “appear” on the right shoulder of the queen?

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No, in fact, you could say it more clearly because that word, “appear”, does not describe an act of movement! And on top of that, the queen has a wall of pawns blocking all passage. How am I supposed to get past?

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What the fuck does “instant transmission” mean?!