Tax Day [DOT 15/7/20]


I know we have a bit of an international crowd here, but if you’re American today is Tax Day.

If you’re me, you just stroked a rather large…check to the IRS.

I’m curious as to what I’m getting for my money because it’s not Universal Healthcare, infrastructure, or any kind of safety net for my fellow citizens during a global pandemic.

How are the Bastille Day woodworking projects coming along? Asking for a friend.

Yesterday’s DOT was a bit of a journey, so I’ll try and keep it short and sweet here so you can catch up.


If you’re a religious person, prayers are in order here. If not, pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Can’t hurt.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg hospitalized for possible infection
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/ruth-bader-ginsburg-hospitalized/2020/07/14/2c6bed80-c61a-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html


I know we love their Trump take-downs, but please don’t give them money. The Lincoln Project is only your friend in the sense that “enemy of my enemy is my friend”.

Lincoln Project video editor is out over crude tweets about female anatomy
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/14/lincoln-project-video-editor-is-out-over-crude-tweets-about-female-anatomy/


I love to see him lose, but the winner isn’t an improvement.


Stonks!

Dow futures jump 250 points after Moderna says its vaccine produces antibodies to coronavirus
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/14/stock-market-futures-open-to-close-news.html


Sprots!

The scuttlebutt is that there is more going on at Fed Ex Field than just the name change. Maybe we’ll hear more soon…


Shoes! OF COURSE Rihanna is lovely and perfect.

‘Everything you think Rihanna would be, she’s that’ – Fenty insiders tell all
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2020/jul/14/everything-you-think-rihanna-would-be-shes-that-fenty-insiders-tell-all



Have a great day!

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33 Comments

  1. Tommy Tuberville is a real name and not a cartoon character from the 1980s? That’s hilarious. Suppose he makes it into the Senate and his colleagues have to say things like, “With all due respect to the honorable Senator Tuberville” with a straight face.
     
    Just googled. His wife’s name is Suzanne so I suppose she’s Suzi Tuberville, and his children’s names are Tucker and Troy. This is Nickelodeon content begging to be created.

  2. Ugh, Tax Day. Mine have been done a long time, but we had to file my mother-in-law’s. Please, people, clean up your shit before you die. Don’t leave businesses and properties and mounds of debt behind for your children to unsnarl. It’s heartbreaking watching my wife try to deal with her father’s estate and realize he was 1. a truly awful businessman and 2. probably suffering from dementia for the last decade or so. Ninety-year-olds should NOT be running businesses. 

    • Ugh, I’m sorry that is a nightmare. I deal with it with clients all the time. One dude was on his deathbed trying to give his wife passwords to accounts no one knew about but him. 

      • Fortunately, he was technologically illiterate, so that was one problem we didn’t have. Of course, he did everything with paper, so he bounced checks constantly. We did have stocks that were in his name only that couldn’t be transferred so they had to be sold. Weird insurance policies that made no sense but he paid on for years. A home that was about to be foreclosed on in another state that had to be sold (they hadn’t been there in years). The business had to be sold (also nearing foreclosure). My MIL is totally helpless and barely understands money at all — he did EVERYTHING, but badly. And that doesn’t count the number of times he was defrauded by his employee, criminals, and I think criminals working with his employee. Yes, the taxes were INSANE.

        • My parents make nuts and bolts and we just had to take everything away from my mom b/c she has dementia. She’s been the bookkeeper for 47 years; my dad has no clue what to do. Luckily their accountant is decent and we are paying someone in his office to keep the books now. I can’t get them to retire, though I suppose my mother is technically…

          They do everything on paper, including typing invoices on a typewriter. 

          • Oh, God, I forgot the typewriter … yes. I understand your pain. It sucks that there is no way to encourage/require/coerce someone to give up a business.  I understand how it could be completely misused, but I wish there was a way to somehow make it happen. My MIL would be so much better off if they’d just sold everything 10 years ago and put the money into a sensible investment portfolio. 

        • We just dealt with my wife’s uncle’s death and he was a massive hoarder.  It was a nightmare cleaning out the house to sell.  The house was actually my wife’s grandparent’s house and the uncle hadn’t cleaned out the stuff when they had died 25 years ago!!!  Luckily, we had enough family and friends to get it cleaned out and just sold it before the market crashes in the Bay area.  Luckily for us he kept good records and we knew it was coming so most of it went smoothly but still not easy.  Definitely found some weird shit cleaning out his stuff and none of us enjoyed dealing with his gun collection.  Best thing I found was $1 million Iraqi Dinars.  I thought they were worthless, turned out it was worth about $600 though I was not going to try converting them, seems like you might get on a watch list!  My wife’s brother had no problem converting them.

          • Same with my mother-in-law. We brought back piles of crap from their second home that they hadn’t been to in years, at her insistence. That was last August. It’s still in stacks on the floor all around her house. I don’t go past the first room of the house any more. She still wails about things that we “left behind” (I took them to the dump). It’s nuts, because she “remembers” things that weren’t there. “You left my golf clubs!” “No, we didn’t, they weren’t there, and why would they be? When is the last time you played golf? Nineteen-fifty what? If they were there, which they weren’t, they’d be unusable.” And then it’s off to the next thing we “forgot.” My mom was similar, but I’ve got three sisters and a brother and an army of nephews and nieces. We made short work of that nonsense. My wife’s sister is … unreliable (I think she was in jail at that time), so it’s me, her, and my daughter. That’s a week I’ll never get back. 

  3. Can’t link right now coz phone but it sure looks like trump is planning to disappear the Rona stats by hiding them in a gubment database from here
    Seems fishy is all I’m saying

  4. I’m with you Meg. I said prayers for RBG last evening, and mantras this morning – covering all the bases. Not only is she an an extraordinary human being, she is the frail, elderly firewall against another Trump high court appointment. Long may she live.

    • Meanwhile I filed my state and federal taxes electronically a couple of weeks ago with instructions for the funds to be paid through my bank today, 7/15. The money was taken out at 12:01 and 12:03 AM this morning. Imagine if any, ANY other aspect of public sector activity worked with this kind of speed and efficiency. [Still can’t get over the fact that it took 7.5 years to replace one half of a staircase at a NYC subway station I used to commute to.]

      • Amazing how efficient they are when it comes to cashing our checks/pulling our funds, and how inefficient in processing refunds. 

        I always mail checks on the last day, mainly out of spite. 

  5. The thing about that Pearls Before Swine cartoon is that in a bunch of countries taxes essentially do, in fact, do themselves.
     
    The governments in modern countries, including the US, have the data they need already to calculate the taxes of most people. They get income and witholdings reported  by employers, banks report interest, they know if you’re married and have kids. Other countries calculate taxes for citizens, send a report to everone to verify, and that’s it.
     
    US conservatives want the tax system to be as aggravating as possible so they can have PR they can use to push for more tax cuts for the rich and corporations in the name of tax simplification. They block auto-filing by the IRS because they want to punish everyday Americans. They are sick, sick people.

    • The US also has the most complicated tax code by far, riddled with loopholes and one-offs and carve-outs. 
       
      But let’s say you’re not someone like Donald Trump and do faithfully report income or lack thereof and legitimate losses, but have a return that’s somewhat complicated. Tax accountants exist. In the same way that the civilized world has National Health services but private insurers and private medical practices exist. 

  6. If you’re reluctantly keeping The Lincoln Project at arm’s length, then go ahead and give a full-on embrace to MeidasTouch. Their takedowns hit way harder anyway, because they often use that fucker and his cronies’ actual words against them. Here are a few of my favorites:


     
    As for taxes, well, I went downtown yesterday to submit the very last of mine and had decided while I was down there to stop by the Board of Elections office and request a mail-in ballot, since the broken clock of my state’s governor signed legislation making that option available to every registered voter here, and the funny thing is . . . I ended up actually fucking VOTING!
    There was a sign outside that said VOTE HERE and polling cubicles for electronic ballots throughout the lobby, even though our next election isn’t for about another three weeks. I didn’t know where to go, so I just asked at the Absentee office, and the lady behind the glass was like, “You want a mail-in ballot. You don’t wanna vote today?” I asked her if I could, and she said sure, had me fill out a couple of papers and escorted me upstairs to where the paper ballots were. And then, yeah, I went ahead and voted.

    Of course, I had to check a reason — any reason — for voting absentee because that’s required here (and my state has a Republican supermajority, so COVID-19’s just not good enough). I do have a disability, but it’s not severe enough to let me park in the fucking handicapped spaces, much less leave me incapacitated or confined to my home, so I just ended up going with “Religious beliefs and practices.” No one ever questioned my justifications, but if they had, here’s what I’d have told them: As an agnostic, I may not know if God is real, but I know that this pandemic sure as fuck is, and forcing people to risk their health by standing in line to vote in person during one — or disenfranchising them from voting at all — is pretty close to the epitome of evil right there.

  7. I’m excited about the Moderna vaccine, I actually invested in them at the beginning of this so hope this works out.  My wife is worried about some of the side effects but so far they don’t seem to be serious enough to derail it.  We will see if they can pull of the execution and distribution of it.  Getting the idiots we have in this country to actually trust it will be another fight I don’t have much faith in.

    • oh boy, this comment (first) is a “times pick”:

      This is all very confusing. Women lecture us constantly that they are empowered, bold, clear-thinking individuals who can manage their own affairs and make their own complex life decisions completely, thank you very much.
       
      We are told that prostitutes are “sex workers” who deserve dignity for the work they do, and probably even SEP-IRAs. Same goes for strippers, who in some febrile feminist imaginations, are actually striking back at The Man and righteously exploiting their patrons.
       
      Stop with the victim talk. Stop demonizing the men who want to see the breasts of extremely attractive women in their 20s. News flash: men like to see them, and extremely attractive women in their 20s routinely use that to their advantage, in a whole variety of settings.
       
      And stop infantilizing these women. Grow. Up.

      who the hell is making the ‘times picks’?

      UPDATE: if you look it’s on the ‘NYT Picks’ and not the ‘Reader Picks’ tab

  8. ummm…im kinda bored..sorry…being home alone already got stale… probably wont be awake for the duan..
    so im dropping a new local early


    mmm…thats one hellova voice…
    dont know where all these local bands are popping up from…but its nice for me

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