Real Boy

I finally convinced the California tax Nazis that I’m an actual person. Then they tried charging me for taxes I already paid after they deigned to believe I am in fact real.

After I sent evidence I already paid, they screwed around for a few weeks, required a ton more documents, then admitted that I’d already paid all my taxes. To me it felt like a strategy to extort more tax money out of anyone who wouldn’t fight it.

Well, I fought and would’ve gotten an attorney if needed. I pay all my taxes in full and on time but no way in hell I am giving a government free money. Especially the California state government.

Trusted

Harris to Call For โ€˜Price Gougingโ€™ Ban on Food and Groceries.

This is just a poorly-worded attempt at anti-trust action, which is great. We need a lot more of that. These are not “price controls” in any traditional (or harmful) sense.

Harris, in her speech, will specifically single out the highly consolidated meat industry, deeming its processing middlemen โ€œparticularly egregiousโ€ price fixers with a history of being found to have illegally controlled prices.

She also plans to direct her administration to carefully scrutinize proposed mergers between large food companies with an emphasis on considering whether they will result in higher grocery prices for consumers

That’s exactly what the FTC and DOJ should be doing a whole lot more of. We need to get American trust enforcement back on track as illegal consolidation and related price fixing is causing unnecessarily high inflation. I support what she’s doing 100%, but not the speechwriter who put those words in her mouth. This statement also makes it more likely she’ll keep Lina Khan in place at the FTC, who is the best chair that org has had since the 1950s.

Some Big News

The Swiftboating of Walz is Sick, Inacurate, and Will Fail.

Agreed. So the big scandalous news is that Walz retired after serving 24 years in the Guard? The Republicans have to do better if they want to have any hope (besides another coup).

His unit was fully staffed and had adequate leadership without him. In fact, had the unit not had appropriate staffing, they could have denied his retirement and ordered a โ€œstop loss,โ€ which happened to thousands of military members in jobs that needed people. Stop loss was used regularly and would have been enacted if the situation deemed it.

Exactly. I was at risk for stop loss when I got out because my unit was going to be sent to Kosovo. Like Walz, I’d already declined to re-enlist before I knew this deployment was likely to occur. Luckily, I did not get stop-lossed but it was a real possibility.

The article I linked to is slightly inaccurate, though. There is no “Chief Master Sgt.” in the Army National Guard (or regular Army). That’s an Air Force rank. It’s Command Sergeant Major. Walz held that rank for a few years, but never completed the coursework to keep it upon retirement. Happens all the time, especially in the Guard. It’s probably more appropirate to say he is a “retired Master Sergeant” or whatever it says on his DD-214 but really it’s irrelevant. Walz served as a CSM and then retired. End of story.

Nothing really to see here.

Kampaign

Kamala is a much better candidate than I thought she’d be, and actually has energy for campaigning and fundraising. This’ll be a good natural experiment to see how much that matters1, especially if the economy continues to hum along about the same as it is now.

I am glad that I was wrong about her capabilities and prospects.

  1. A lot of political scientists claim all of this is irrelevant, but I don’t believe them.

Average Car Insurance Prices Expected to Hit $2,500 This Year.

Democratic attacks on JD Vance are working. Good. That guy is a fucking weasel.

Press Must Cover Trumpโ€™s Cognitive Decline. But they will not. They need the election to be a close one.

Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History.

Florida Invests in Catastrophe. The Sunshine State is putting public pension money into risky bonds that transfer risk away from insurance companies.

The coming Republican freakout.

Mass deportation would accomplish nothing.

China Is in Denial About the War in Ukraine. Why Chinese Thinkers Underestimate the Costs of Complicity in Russiaโ€™s Aggression. Yeah, long-term China has really fucked itself over there.

โ€˜Stress on Shelvesโ€™โ€”the Battle for Space in Store Aisles.

Why false claims that a picture of a Kamala Harris rally was AI-generated matter. There are absolutely zero signs of AI generation there and I am exceptionally good at detecting such manipulations.