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.

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.

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

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.

Do you win if they die? Because solid chance they are killed by someone else or drugs.

I am a software engineer and I also have a PC with RGB vomit. But not because I’m a software engineer. Because I’m also a dork, and the icy blue color keeps my cpu cold.

squirms in discomfort

Stand with your knees on the floor? I guess just lay prone on your stomach? PLANK FOR THE PATRIOTISM CROSS!

May cause visions, ancestral possession, the ennui brought on by the relentless deterministic passage of time, and the massacre of billions via trans-galactic jihad. Do not mix with alcohol.

On your chest. Much more macho.

The use of heavy handed wording was intentional but not to be dismissive of caring for family, friends, etc. It was meant to be dismissive of a person who thinks that science and discovery is a waste of time and that interpersonal connection is the ONLY thing that matters. THAT point of view is simple, is overly sentimental, is small. If someone is pushing that view than the only thing I can infer is that they simply do not understand the science or its importance, which, today, usually means they’re incapable or too apathetic to try because the knowledge couldn’t be much more accessible than it is. My preference is that science not be maligned as inconsequential or even detrimental. There is plenty of that anti-intellectual sentiment going around and I have no respect for it.

Now do '0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0001" across both knuckles like the classic “LOVE HATE” tat.