Amezarak

65 ms·

811.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Yes, and the IRS does get that information now, whether you file on paper or e-file. But to prefill tax forms or do people’s taxes automatically, they would have had to have already collected this information and not on the client side. Cur
812.
by Amezarak 3y ago
It is very easy to pay nothing for tax filing in the US. There are multiple genuinely free e-file providers and most people could easily file their taxes themselves on paper. That said, while I agree the IRS situation can be dramatically im
813.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Archaeology, like many fields, is chock-full of bunk. Of course you're right we shouldn't immediately dismiss it or assume we know more than they do. But neither should we trust-by-default, either. The GP is asking a perfectly rea
814.
by Amezarak 3y ago
The mythological background of Tolkien is that we’re looking at the Catholic world as we know it, interpreted through the lens of myth and Elves. Catholicism is literally true in LotR. Tolkien even has an essay where Finrod says that the on
815.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Saruman and Wormtongue drastically accelerated their destruction of the Shire because the protagonists let them go free. Much less damage would have been done and the final effect would have been the same if they’d just killed them.
816.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Do you have a citation for this? My historical understanding was that throughout the late 18th, 19th and very early 20th centuries the Industrial Revolution and urbanization made it a financial necessity for (non-farming) women to work outs
817.
by Amezarak 3y ago
"conspiracy against rights" is a recently popular charge that would seem to apply
818.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Here’s a conspiracy theory: it’s not the 5G vaccine microchip fringe that’s the problem, it’s the people who make sure to bring up the wildest, most extreme oppositional “conspiracy theories” when defending their beliefs in order to paint a
819.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Hospitals and public health systems owned and operated by city and county governments are not actually unusual in the US. They're fairly common.
820.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Even family health insurance typically costs 20k-30k in total (employer included) premiums a year. Life, dental, and vision are not even worth mentioning in comparison. This sounds like it's over the six figure mark to me. Perhaps some
821.
by Amezarak 3y ago
I am strongly opposed to mass industrialized farming of this nature - even if you pretend treating animals like commodities is OK, you're creating an increasingly centralized and fragile food supply - but pigs do not need to be forced
822.
by Amezarak 3y ago
The FBI is continuing to entrap hapless petty criminals into "domestic terror" schemes and then arresting them. Here's them doing it for Muslim terrorists: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul
823.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Nearly everything on the “FBI controversies” page the GP links is dated much more recently than 1976, and it’s hardly comprehensive. For example, it doesn’t mention the continual entrapment of often mentally ill US Muslims, using informants
824.
by Amezarak 3y ago
For most of the FBI’s history, it was run by J Edgar Hoover, who used it to spy on and blackmail innocent Americans and as a political weapon. It’s still the same organization, from spying to entrapment to outright murder to authoritarian p
825.
by Amezarak 3y ago
The only consistent “core principle” is a very general sense of in-group altruism, which gets expressed in wildly different ways. Moralistic perspectives apply to a lot more than just overtly moral acts, as well. At any rate, the “good in y
826.
by Amezarak 3y ago
There’s no such thing as “superhuman” morality, morality is just social mores and norms accepted by the people in a society at some given time. It does not advance or decline, but it changes. What you’re talking about is a very small subset
827.
by Amezarak 3y ago
> These vehicles are relatively more expensive. Yeah, until this gets fixed, I'm not buying an EV. I ran the numbers and after 10 years of ownership and almost 200k miles, the cost of a brand-new ICE car + 10 years of gasoline + mai
828.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Have you cross-referenced that? What I saw was that the lowest economic quintiles of some groups committed less crime than the wealthiest quintiles of other groups. The "economic" in "socio-economic" is important, but so
829.
by Amezarak 3y ago
I don't disagree, but I think the experience of a man who fought in WWI for four years, was wounded seven times, and saw dozens of his friends die is probably more interesting and insightful on the subject than a New Yorker music criti
830.
by Amezarak 3y ago
I always think it’s worth mentioning that All Quiet on the Western Front is a work of fiction, written by a guy who was on the front for about a month, at which time he was wounded and unable to return until a few weeks before the end of th
831.
by Amezarak 3y ago
The Storm of Steel is his most popular book and his WWI memoir, but I think his best fiction work is The Marble Cliffs. It’s one of the few books I immediately reread. In general I recommend totally discounting articles like this until you’
832.
by Amezarak 3y ago
> Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab. Maybe I'm deeply con
833.
by Amezarak 3y ago
They couldn’t use the Silmarillion, only LotR, including appendices, which Tolkien had sold the film rights for long ago when he was in financial distress. Christopher Tolkien, his son and close collaborator, hated the movies and likely was
834.
by Amezarak 3y ago
It’s a generalization, but it holds true on Internet communities in general that the most dedicated people who want and obtain mod power start out beforehand with less than ideal mental health, which is often a contributing factor as to why
835.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Most classical histories include some ethnographic descriptions of foreign rituals. Check out Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, etc. For a modern and extensive compilation, Frazer famously wrote a huge multi-volume work that documents sacrificia
836.
by Amezarak 3y ago
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9000168/pdf/jcm... You are wrong. Surgical interventions are performed for children by reputable hospitals and surgeons.
837.
by Amezarak 3y ago
This doesn’t pass the smell test. Many ancient cultures also ritually sacrificed warriors and nobility.
838.
by Amezarak 3y ago
It doesn't just require Javascript to load the image, it requires Javascript from 13 different domains (thanks, NoScript.) - imgur.com - btloader.com - ccgateway.net - cloudflare - facebook - google analytics - media-lab.ai - sascdn.co
839.
by Amezarak 3y ago
> Nobody with a dose of common sense about the prevailing attitudes in monotheistic religions would say detection of non-earth based life changes nothing. I like Camus, and most would categorize my philosophical beliefs as some breed of
840.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Population #s and GDP mean very little, and thinking we can move the needle on our favorite issues by looking at these needles is the source of a lot of problems. People think you can just spend more and more money on problems and fix them.

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