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Thrashy @ Thrashy @lemmy.world Posts 3Comments 406Joined 2 yr. ago
Thrashy @ Thrashy @lemmy.world
Posts
3
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406
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Years ago they actually sent me a check because they thought I should have taken a deduction that I didn't. I didn't want to get on a gotcha list, so I sent back a letter explaining that the deduction was not proper for my situation, and they responded that if that was the case, I needed to file an amended return. That was way more energy than I wanted to spend on this issue, so I just ignored the check... until the next year, when they mailed me another one with a tartly-worded form letter about the importance of promptly depositing it, and again the year after. At that point I figured if Uncle Sam is that desperate for me to take the money I'd indulge him. At this point I'm well past the statute of repose for any potential issues that created, so I think I'm in the clear, but I guess we'll see.
Yeah... My wife and I together make six figures a year (if only just barely), own a home with a mortgage, and have a kid, and I've never had the itemized deduction exceed the standardized deduction. I think you've either got to specifically structure your financial life around taking deductions, or make "'It's one banana, what could it cost" money to have itemized deductions make any sense, at which point, why are you complaining about the cost of tax prep anyway? A tax accountant doesn't cost that much.
It's also much harder to investigate and shine a spotlight on it, since local news sources have been in decline for years. For many smaller metros, the only local news source may be a weekly newsletter or NPR affiliate, and those rarely have the investigative impact that an old-school local paper would have had, and small-town corruption has flourished like fungus in the dark.
That's entirely fair. Harrow is quite a different book to Gideon, and while it's exactly my brand of (literal) mindfuckery I can't fault somebody else for not clicking with it, going in with the expectation that it was going to be a continuation of the narrative style of Gideon. If you do decide to continue on with the series, you should know Alecto continues to explore some of the same themes and story threads as Harrow, but isn't quite as confusing a read. I also found it to have a bit of a non-ending along the lines of Harrow, but Muir is clearly building towards a conclusion with the fourth novel that I hope will be more satisfying.
Alas, I don't think he will much care to build a subway-but-shitty between one farm outside Waxahachie, TX, to another farm outside of Waxahachie, TX. Not enough density of mouthbreathing Elon stans there.
I think the book of Joshua is a bit more on the nose, in this case. Gotta blot out those Amalekites, you know?
I'd only consider the position if I could figure out a way to manipulate the CEO into executing a rugpull that I engineered to my benefit...
I agree, but in general it's very hard to achieve close racing while also allowing broad freedom to engineer your car, particularly in a formula that is so aero-dependent. CFD and wind tunnel time is ruinously expensive, and the more permissive the regs are the larger the problem space you need to explore to find the fastest car design. Consequently, it's easier for a well-heeled team to just outspend everybody else to optimize their car into victory (see Merc until '21 and Red Bull since the new formula began).
WEC is having some luck with its "downforce design quota" approach, but even so they can't get really close racing over an endurance race without BoP adjustments, which is something I don't think the teams will countenance.
As today's sprint and a couple others this season show, the sprint can be a good show. The shorter duration reduces the effects of tire degradation on the racing, keeps the field bunched up and makes for more passing and extended duels, instead of on the full-length race where teams are playing a longer strategy game rather than fighting to hold position on the track, and smaller performance differences between the cars accumulate over time to spread the field out.
However, I think F1 needs to either make changes to maintain that level of intensity throughout the longer race distance (i.e., longer lasting tires that won't melt from agressive attacking or defending maneuvers, allow refueling to reduce weight at the start of the race, tighten up the rules more towards a spec series to keep car performance closer together) or accept that F1 is a different kind of racing from NASCAR or IndyCar, with a more tactical and cerebral presentation. Teams don't particularly like the sprint format and it takes away from the quality of the main event due to lost practice sessions.
Israel has one of the most sophisticated military-industrial complexes in the world, with vast expertise in electronics and remote sensing specifically. If they wanted to build a precision-guided kinetic weapon for targeted assassinations of Hamas fighters in dense urban areas, they could have done it without a second thought. Instead they spend their efforts on building an oppressive surveillance apparatus and robotic machine guns to better punish rock-throwing teenagers, and lob bombs into population centers to deal with Hamas in the area.
re: the tunnels... these things tend to happen when you herd millions of people into a walled ghetto, cut off access to resources, and leave it to be run by what is effectively an overgrown prison gang. The fact that Hamas is willing to use civilians -- nearly half of them children -- as human shields does not excuse the use of indiscriminate force in calling that bluff. Again and again and again, Israel has made it abundantly clear that there is no war crime it will not excuse in the course of these retributive strikes, because the lives of Palestinians are worth less than nothing to Israeli leadership.
I don't trust an apartheid settler-colonial state run by a wannabe theocratic dictator any farther than I can throw it. Bottom line, you don't have to trust Hamas either to see that Israel's response to Hamas actions are both wildly disproportionate and completely indiscriminate in their targeting. Israeli political figures are on record that they don't believe there is such a thing as an innocent Palestinian civilian and it shows in their willingness to slaughter bystanders by the dozens to get at a handful of suspected Hamas fighters.
I mean, there's a lot to be criticized about the US and its actions in the "global war on terror," but we actually built a missile for this exact circumstance, so that you don't have to blow up an entire goddamn refugee camp to get one or two guys hiding inside it. Israel has the military capability to do something similar, they just don't care. Palestinians aren't people as far as they're concerned.
I had a similar experience -- science curriculum was weird because while it was generally solid on the basics of physics and biology, the fundie taboo against evolution and/or acknowledging the age of the universe meant some topics had to be talked around, ignored, or handwaved away. Our curriculum of choice didn't go as far as "the Devil buried dinosaur bones to trick scientists into atheism," but I've heard stories.
Where things got more insidious, IMO, is in the softer subjects like history. Most of the available curricula are written from an explicitly right-wing perspective, and offer a perspective on world history that is often virulently jingoistic and bigoted. Our American History curriculum was from a popular publisher affiliated with a southern religious school that banned interracial dating until 2000, and only dropped the ban under legal pressure -- as you might imagine, it was explicit in its support of the Lost Cause mythology of the Confederacy, among other distortions.
Worse still, though, is the way that homeschooling can give cover to abuse and neglect. Like you I got a pretty good education in spite of all the above, but I know people from that community who experienced abuse at the hands of their parents and had no way to escape because their access to the outside works was carefully managed and controlled. There's a reason why one of my closest friends from those days is now deeply involved with an advocacy group campaigning for tighter regulation and oversight of homeschooling families -- she has some horror stories to tell.
My wife and I also met on OKCupid, probably around the same time as you -- Tinder-like features were starting to appear, but the core of the experience was still about reading other users' personal essays and comparing compatibility quiz responses. Of all the services I tried, OKCupid (in that particular incarnation, at least) seemed like the only one that was genuinely aimed at fostering deep personal connections. I haven't been on any of the apps in almost a decade now, but it really seems like the shallow, gamified Tinder model of "swipe right if they look hot" ate up the marketplace, to the detriment of everyone.
I think OP is referring to the original streaming status quo, where Netflix was the only game in town, it cost under 15 bucks a month, and everybody licensed their back catalog to them rather than developing their own competing platforms.
What's got me particularly worried this time around is that the Israeli response is going to make the radicalization problem so much worse than it was before... unless Israel intends to complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Netanyahu is undeniably evil, but I don't think he's stupid, so he must know this too, which can really only mean one thing -- but nobody in power in the West seems to be willing to acknowledge that, let alone step in to stop it.
This area of Texas has infamously expansive clay soils, such that buildings require specialized foundation systems designed to decouple the building from the surface layer of soil entirely and provide several inches of headroom for the clays to swell in wet weather without creating uplift pressure on the foundation. Without that, the soil will push structures upward when wet, and then leave them unsupported after drying. This leads to uneven subsidence and progressive structural failure.
When COTA was originally built, a massive subsurface drainage system was installed to mitigate this issue, but according to some even that was cut down significantly from the civil engineers' original recommendations for cost, and then when the circuit was flooded in 2015, the system was damaged and stopped being able to keep up with soil moisture levels. That's when the bumps started happening, and unfortunately they're not likely to stop without massive underground work to fully repair the drainage system. COTA is going to require expensive resurfacing every few years until that happens, or the track's financial supporters decide it's not worth the cost to maintain anymore. Without it, it will quickly become undriveable for most race cars.
I've read both Nettle and Bone and Nona the Ninth, and while Nettle and Bone was a fun read at no point while reading it did I think "hey, this is Hugo Award material!" It's firmly in Kingfisher's romantic fantasy wheelhouse, and hits all the tropes that subgenre is known for. I'd say the romance is more subtly threaded through the main plot than in her Saints of Steel series, but I came away from it with the sense that it was just a very good piece of genre fiction.
In contrast, Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series (of which Nona is the third entry) has been such a delightful, genre-bending romp that I would put it well ahead of most anything else I've read in the last few years. It remains to be seen if Muir can land the plane with Alecto, but (while I admit it's a challenging read at first) Harrow the Ninth in particular is just so masterful at spinning an arch-gothic space opera tale through the eyes of a very unconventional and insanely unreliable narrator, and it's peppered with mad twists to boot. I'll grant that it was up against stiff competition from Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan novels in the last couple years, but I personally would still have given Nona the Ninth the nod over Nettle and Bone this year.
That's a slur on Denver that I won't countenance, and I've only ever been through its airport. Omaha is a city that cannot justify its existence. Denver at the very least has outdoor activities nearby.
Scott Manley suggested the hot-stage combined with the fast flip maneuver may have caused fuel to slosh away from the intakes in the tank, leading to ingestion of gas bubbles in the fuel lines. Those would have damaged or destroyed engines as they worked their way into the turbo pumps, leading to the progressive engine-outs seen on the stream before the eventual catastrophic failure of the booster.