It’s somewhat accurate to say “every penny they make is taxABLE to Uncle Sam” which is different from saying 100% tax rate. Americans living outside the US still need to file a tax return and report all their income, and pay tax on it to the US, even if it is from a foreign source. That said they could claim the foreign tax credit if they paid tax to a foreign regime on that income already, or the foreign income exclusion under some circumstances which would reduce their taxable income to the US.

Well thank god we don’t have any Death Panels from Obamacare though!

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

They call it “Lincoln’s Tax War” in the South.

What makes you think I don’t already wear a crime fighting suit to work? There was a documentary about it and everything, The Accountant. I specialize in espionage, intrusion/counter intrusion, taking some CPE next week for long range assault weaponry, the usual.

He should’ve posted them all online. As a cpa with a bit of rare downtime on my hands I’d love to volunteer to review returns for the irs. I know all the errors and omissions, tricks and and gimmicks, goofs, fuckups, whoopsies, you name it. 20% commission for the recovered taxes seems fair compensation.

I read once that maybe Sweden or Norway has publicly available tax returns. BUT, the person whose return you look at gets notified when you view it, so you can’t just go around subtly snooping on your friends and neighbors without being noticed. Idk if that’s true though.

The USA is run by unpaid 22 year old interns being supervised by underpaid 24 year olds.

Old people in charge are definitely a problem (McConnell, Feinstein etc) but the people in their offices doing all the heavy lifting are basically children.

I researched and it turns out no fully automatic weapons have been available for a few decades now. Tightly controlled. Semi automatic is just as lethal though. Also apparently the las vegas shooter in 2018 use bump stocks on his semi automatics which makes it pseudo automatic if you’ll pardon the pun. Notably, the DOJ announced this bump stock reg in 2018, under the Trump administration. Interesting, but not surprising, that the insane right didn’t lose their shit about “muh gunz” when it happened under Trump’s reign.

Ironic argument for someone in a country where you can buy actual assault weapons over the counter, isn’t it?

I spoke with a far left friend of mine about this. His position essentially boiled down to the risk of a massive nuclear disaster outweighed the benefits. I said what about the known disastrous consequences of coal and oil? Didn’t really have a response to that. It doesn’t make sense to me. I’ll roll those dice and take the .00001% chance risk or whatever.

It bugs me when people call any stupid little picture or comic a meme. It also bugs me when people say they are making a meme. One does not simply “make” a meme. It must become a meme on its own. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got some clouds to yell at.

Since the comments all appear to be juvenile Reddit style jokes, here’s TFA (the frickin article: https://futurism.com/scientists-selectively-erased-memories-in-snails-are-we-next#

Note, I’m not a scientist.

As I suspected it appears they tortured the snails somehow (my guess is electric shock) to create traumatic memories. This has been done with caterpillars I think to see if they retain memories after turning into butterflies and they do, despite basically turning into primordial goop in the cocoon. They do, and it’s tested by seeing if they retain aversions to certain areas of their cages that are electrified.

Then something about enzymes created which associate memory with pain and being able to target them.

Pretty cool, and I for one definitely have a few traumas I’d like erased.

Markets are not always fair or efficient but that doesn’t mean capitalism is a pyramid scheme. It is still very much the opposite.

It fundamentally is NOT a pyramid scheme. In a pyramid scheme there is no actual product or service of value and simply extracts wealth from the people in lower tiers. Value, or wealth, is simply the byproduct of an equitable transaction between two or more parties.

Imagine you own a goose that lays golden eggs. It lays one golden egg per year. How much would you sell it for? Probably not one golden egg, but definitely you’d sell if for a million gold eggs. You’d probably settle for maybe 5? 10? 15? Something like that.

Suppose the goose only lays one egg per year now (or none at all!) but it’s still young and most people expect it to start laying four or five or even ten or twenty eggs per year in a few years from now. It’s impossible to tell for sure how many it’ll lay over its life, or when that will happen, or if it will happen at all. NOW how much do you sell it for?

That’s the stock market.

A bunch of investors think a bunch of gooses will start laying a ton more golden eggs soon, and they’re willing to pay big bucks now in exchange for the possibility of that in the future. This isn’t a pyramid scheme or a zero sum game or anything like that. It’s just a prediction of the future which may or may not be correct, and only time will tell.

There’s an accountant shortage too, which nobody talks about except us in the industry. It SHOULD be talked about though, because it’s another huge ticking time bomb. Financial statements audits performed by third party external accountants are designed to keep businesses honest and report factual numbers to investors. If they report false information then you get situations like Enron.

The problem is that we are overworked and underpaid like everyone else, the work has gotten vastly more complicated, regulatory compliance requirements are more burdensome than helpful, and tons of other issues. The results are that accounting enrollment has plummeted in schools, experienced professionals are being driven away from the industry in huge numbers, and more and more work is being sent overseas to be done extremely poorly. Corporations pay for their own audits and firm partners don’t want to lose a good client so crappy work gets pushed through no matter what.

I’m convinced the next major financial crisis will be from a bunch of huge household name companies getting caught with their pants down after fudging too many numbers. Just a matter of time.