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Cake day: October 6th, 2024

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  • And those saner people handed Trump Thune instead of Scott via blind vote. They know what’s up. Like I said, sane people do not want to be in his administration. They want to babysit his administration. Nothing good comes from befriending that guy and everyone on Earth who doesn’t believe in hurricane machines knows that, even GOP.

    Practically the only people who are around Trump are riding his coattails for their own reasons and they have no qualms about it


  • It’s not like he has much choice. Sane, reasonable people aren’t exactly raising their hands at this point and the only people clamoring for roles are batshit quasi-politicians who have similar contempt for any institution that has a basis formed in reality but wildly different agendas

    Edit: dunno why you downvoted me. Honestly, who else do you think would take these positions? Pence? Kelly? Barr? Mattis? Haley? Christie? Tillerson? Milley? Bolton? Scaramucci? Cohen? DeVos? Chao? Grisham? … Bueller? Dude’s a fucking joke. Take the wooden spatula and start scraping that barrel out because there’s absolutely nothing but sludge


  • There’s a substantial assumption that the wealthy know best how to manage wealth and the economy but it’s all predicated on the notion that those wealthy people are willing to act in the interest of everyone, when in fact they tend to act on their own personal interest (I mean, if someone has a net worth of over a billion dollars and they’re trying to accumulate even more money, that should give you a good idea how their policy will affect people who are making 40k/yr). They tend not to want to create jobs or increase wages more than they want to improve quality of earnings, because they stand to lose a lot and they somehow want more






  • Trump actually can’t do that in this scenario (well he can but it’ll royally fuck him over) which is kind of funny.

    If it was in the budget and money was handed out at intervals via appropriation he could just turn the faucet off, but since it’s a loan and the principal disbursed to the debtor, it falls into contract law, which is very pro-contract with probably a couple centuries of precedent.

    Boiled down, only way a creditor can force a debtor to pay the remaining principal in full outside the terms of the contract is if they put an Acceleration Clause in the contract. Usually those are thrown into loans in order to recover any collateral in the event the debtor does not fulfill the terms of the contract. IE: someone quits making car payments for enough time, repo guy shows up, they auction car and apply it to the balance and demand the rest due immediately.

    But acceleration clauses in practically every contract ever drafted, they’re contingent on the debtor’s performance in upholding the terms of the contract, so they almost always come into play if and only if the debtor quits performing their duties.

    So without that, or if the acceleration clause isn’t applicable, debtor almost always has the right but not the obligation to pay early, creditor has no right to do the same, and creditor’s only real way to get out of the loan is to sell the rights to the debt (the servicing) to someone else, or to issue a COD (cancellation of debt). Cancellation is as it sounds, they just tear up the contract and let the debtor walk away (edit: I should note that the unfulfilled obligation is treated as taxable income for the debtor, like a gift of sorts, so they gotta pay tax on it and then walk away, but slightly pedantic). Debtor keeps whatever you gave them, debtor no longer has a contractual obligation to pay you back. It’s almost always used alongside negotiation, for example bankruptcy, they might say “if you give us this much money we’ll eat the rest of the loss”, kinda compel someone to pay that creditor first and give the creditor some way to try to wring out a couple bucks that would otherwise be a pain in the ass to collect.

    So basically Trump’s only real option is to sell the debt or just do some big loan forgiveness thing lol


  • _bcron_@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzBombs Awat
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    11 hours ago

    No, it’s all the same in that regard - a ladybug will have a far higher surface area to volume/mass, and that affects terminal velocity.

    Ladybug might have 10 square millimeters and weigh .05 grams, 200 square millimeters per gram

    Elephant might have 15 square meters and weigh 5000 kilograms. 15 million square millimeters and 5 million grams, so 3 square millimeters per gram

    But the elephant in the room (slaps knee) is momentum.

    Let’s say, hypothetically, we shove a ladybug and an elephant off a 125m cliff and pretend they both have a ridiculously high terminal velocity. That’s enough for them to reach 50 meters per second or 180kph. .05 gram ladybug’s momentum would be an infinitessimally small 2.5 kg·m/s, meanwhile the elephant is at 250000 kg·m/s, and the elephant explodes.

    The thing that makes the ladybug survive the fall (ridiculously low mass relative to surface area) is the same thing that would make a ladybug freeze in minutes if you tossed it in a freezer. Conversely, elephant wouldn’t really be bothered by a couple minutes in a freezer.

    It’s that rapid change in internal body temperature that stresses smaller fish out, dumping them in water that is much colder or warmer than them


  • I was thinking more of the tried and true soviet RKG3 and the half dozen variants/clones. They’re terrifying when they work, but everyone figured out that cope cages and improvised shields create such a gap that renders them mostly useless, and at the end of the day it’s playing lawn darts with a tank. For some reason they’re still all over the place, probably used more for IEDs or destroying infrastructure than tanks




  • Yeah, the basic premise for these things is that they have a smaller radius, but you can throw them further, so the enemy has to deal with it exactly the same, but since the radius is smaller and you threw it further, it gives you a much larger space in which you can advance and not worry about shrapnel. Basically lob a couple and while you don’t have to deal with so much suppressive fire, advance and find cover and do it all over again.

    For defensive scenarios, you generally aren’t advancing, you’re just wanting the enemy to not advance, so a pineapple works just as well, if not better. It gives you a big boom, and psychologically that gives you an edge. You might also get flushed out and wind up in close quarters kinds of environments where the grenade on a stick just doesn’t work, but the pineapple is easy enough to lob out of a window or bunker or around a corner. In any sort of urban or close quarters environment you’d want the flexibility of a baseball as opposed to throwing a bat.

    Kind of a trench war novelty, but they’ve evolved to be more of an antiarmor thing - throw a parachute on it so it’s aligned vertically, make it detonate when it lands, make it blow straight down as opposed to all over the place, and try to get that thing to land on a tank


  • _bcron_@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzBombs Awat
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    2 days ago

    One of the bigger reasons has to do with the square cube law - as the size of something increases, surface area increases by a factor of 2 but mass increases by a factor of 3, so little fishes have a surface area-to-mass ratio that is quite a bit higher than a larger fish, and they’re more susceptible to abrupt changes in temperature.

    Kinda like how an ice cube will melt a lot faster than a big slab of ice, the core temperature of some small fish like a goldfish is gonna change more rapidly than the core temperature of a big fish like a trout so they tend to be a lot more finnicky in regard to significant and instantaneous changes to temperature and stuff. A larger fish might shrug off a significant change because it affects them more slowly, but that might be a totally wild an overwhelming experience for a little fish to go through



  • Here’s line 8z on the schedule 1, as you can see and like I said, it’s not specifically for income generated for illegal activity. It’s for all other income, and since there’s no box specifically for that kind of income, you’d list it under other income.

    If there was a line specifically for illegal activity you’d put it there, but there isn’t, so you put it in the catch-all ‘other income’.

    Furthermore, 8z is like form 8949 (sale/disposition of other assets) in that the description is blank for the filer to fill out, so one doesn’t need to explicitly state that it’s from illegal activity. If you’re a fence and bought a bunch of stolen power tools and sold them at a profit you’d probably just want to put ‘sale of refurbished power tools’ rather than ‘sale of unlawfully-acquired power tools’


  • Yeah, the legality of the source of the gain or income is irrelevant in regard to taxation.

    There’s actually no line in the 1040 specifically for income arising from illegal activity, no box to check or anything, so it’s hard for the IRS to even filter returns with that criteria.

    Most criminals with significant income from illegal activity still have to worry about the random audit or being the focus of interdepartmental attention so many do pay taxes and have a decent backstory to explain how they pay their mortgage, but money laundering is a more common way to go about as opposed to listing a whole bunch of vague shit as other income (which would raise quite a few questions if their file was pulled).

    Fun movie trivia: in The Irishman, De Niro’s character, a hitman, claimed to ‘paint houses’ for a living due to his ability to furnish receipts for things like rollers, rags, cleaning supplies, and drop cloths. Probably bought a lot of paint too and handed it off to be tossed it in some dumpster


  • Not to mention how fallacious it is for someone to claim that vaccination is bad for everyone on the basis that they have been lead to believe bad for women that are or could become pregnant.

    It’s about as sensible as saying no one should eat shellfish because some people have allergies.

    Let’s say, hypothetically, vaccines always cause autism. If someone is truly concerned about the health of newborns would they not want all who cannot or will not reproduce to be vaccinated in order to lessen the risk of infection of communicable disease?