Saturday’s Forum

FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Comments

  1. de stijl says:

    A couple days back I woke up out of a dream recent enough where I basically remembered everything.

    In my dream a cubic yard of cash money came into my possession. Unexplained dream logic, don’t ask why.

    Most of the dream was trying to figure out how to launder the unexplained cash.

    Upon waking it was fresh in mind. My brain kept poking at the money laundering problem. How could you get away with it?

    I spent many years working directly for a major mortgage lender. We were required by law to undergo yearly training about OCC rules intending to thwart money laundering. I worked in IT – none of it applied to my job or to my department’s wider purview at all. Not even close! But every year the same fucking video. Compliance requirement. No big deal – an hour a year.

    An hour after waking up my brain was still loy-key working the problem. My brain was clearly liking the challenge and was working through possible solutions. Kept at it. At times it required frontal lobe decision making to step forward.

    For a big portion of this week I have thought about how to launder a cubic yard of hundred dollar bills I somehow possess because of a dream.

    I appreciated the thought exercise. And my brain is damn clever. Not like Breaking Bad and Saul Goodman pitching a laser tag franchise.

    Walt only bought the car wash just to humiliate his old boss who’d humiliated him in his narcissistic head.

    A car wash or a laser tag franchise can only wash so much. Maybe 100k per year. if you are the highest grossing, most profitable car wash in the nation you will get tax and regulatory attention. Or with a laser tag franchise.

    A very knotty problem. How?

    1
  2. wr says:

    Interesting new poll from USA Today asked what people think of “wokeness.”

    Turns out 56% of all Americans think it means just being respectful of other people and are in favor of it. Including 51% of independents and a third of Republicans. (To be precise, they understand it to mean “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.”)

    Same poll has opposition to current GOP book bans at 71-26.

    Which means that the DeSantis campaign may not be quite the general election juggernaut some have been fearing.

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/08/gop-war-woke-most-americans-see-term-positive-ipsos-poll/11417394002/

    7
  3. Kathy says:

    @de stijl:

    I’m not sure whether washing is preferable to dry cleaning. On the one hand, water can mess up paper money. On the other, dry cleaning solvents might remove the ink off the paper. I’m not sure how high water or dryer temps can affect the modern plastic notes in such countries that have them.

    2
  4. Sleeping Dog says:

    @wr:

    When you’re a political party that didn’t bother to write a platform during the last prez election, has leadership in one legislative house, whose plan is to do absolutely nothing and the party members in the other house can’t agree on whether the sun rises, you go with what you have.

    1
  5. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Simon Rosenberg
    @SimonWDC

    Let the mighty Jobs Day thread begin!

    311,000 new jobs, another really strong jobs report. Now:

    33.8m jobs – 16 yrs Clinton, Obama
    12.4m jobs – 25 months Biden
    1.9m jobs – 16 yrs Bush, Bush, Trump

    6 times as many Biden jobs as last 3 Rs combined. 1/
    ………………………………….
    In my With Democrats Things Get Better presentation I talk about why it’s critical that Dems work to establish this basic contrast:

    Ds = growth, lower deficits, progress for workers/families
    Rs= recession, higher deficits, American decline

    Watch 13/

    I’ve been ready to go since 6:30. Still waiting for my wife to get it together. When I die, my gravestone is going to say, “This time I’m not waiting.”

    1
  6. CSK says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Have a great time.

  7. gVOR08 says:

    @de stijl: I read years ago that W. C. Fields, when he was a touring vaudeville act, would take his pay and immediately deposit it in a local bank. Supposedly when he died he left small amounts unclaimed all over the place. I believe banks are required to report cash transactions over $10,000. Do a George Santos. Put $9,999 deposits all over the place. You might need to travel, but you can afford a vacation. You have laptops and spreadsheets to track it, which Fields didn’t. Or does the dream include some fear the serial numbers are recorded somewhere?

    This is in the context of SVB and seeing somebody say that large depositors don’t need to forego FDIC insurance. Apparently there’s a financial services company that will take your gazillion dollars and divvy it up into multiple insured $250,000 accounts. Diversification. What a concept. Perhaps SVB should have tried it.

    1
  8. gVOR08 says:

    @OzarkHillbilly: I’m amazed at how much time can pass between, “I’m ready to go.” and actually being at the door.

    2
  9. MarkedMan says:

    The post on Rod Dreher got me thinking about Pat Buchanan and an odd hall pass given to him and a couple of other politicians (Ron and Rand Paul): despite very well documented racist beliefs of the most base and vile sort, and ongoing associations with various rascists and fascists, they are virtually never challenged by the media and in fact are treated as serious people.

    What is it about these three that gives them this seemingly total immunity?

    3
  10. MarkedMan says:

    @gVOR08: FWIW, banks are required to report deposits of over $10K and also any suspicious transaction. A deposit of $9999 is most likely going to be viewed as a suspicious transaction.

  11. Michael Reynolds says:

    @wr:
    I texted that same poll to my daughter – our communication is largely via text because we are modern and all – and suggested maybe it’s time for the counter-attack.

    1
  12. CSK says:

    @MarkedMan:

    First there was Buchanan, then there was Palin, and then there was Trump.

    You may find this interesting:
    http://www.nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/pat-buchanan-a-vindicated-extremist-packs-it-in.html

  13. Mister Bluster says:

    @gVOR08:.. at the door.
    “at the door” and “out the door” are two different locations in the universe and can be separated by eons of time.

    1
  14. Stormy Dragon says:

    So apparently the real scandal at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital is that Jamie Reed was digging through the medical files of random patients she had no reason to be accessing, making a spreadsheets of people she thought weren’t really trans (despite not being a doctor, much less their doctor), and then sharing their PHI with right-wing politicians and “reporters”:

    This is the scandal. This is the scandal. This is the scandalWorkers at a gender clinic were keeping a spreadsheet of the clients that they thought were not really trans, and they shared that spreadsheet with socially conservative politicians and Jesse effing Singal pic.twitter.com/IFBdJwjo8V— Jill Dilts (@BusinessWaffles) March 11, 2023

    I guess the only good news is that this means that the NYT’s biased coverage is going to suddenly and mysteriously end.

    2
  15. CSK says:

    According to Mark Epstein, Jeffrey’s brother, Jeffrey dumped Trump when he found out that Trump was a crook.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epstein-dropped-donald-trump-realizing-crook-brother-says-2023-3

  16. Kathy says:

    @Mister Bluster:

    Actually they’re separated by a spatio-temporal anomaly that takes a long time to traverse.

  17. Mister Bluster says:

    @Kathyspatio-temporal anomaly that takes a long time to traverse.
    Equivalent to how long it’s going to take me to master the keyboard on my new iPhone.

  18. EddieInCA says:

    I’ll be in London and Edinburgh over the next few weeks. I know London really well, having lived there twice. But Edinburgh…? I’ve only visited twice for short periods. Does anyone have any cool things to do in Ediburgh that doesn’t involve a castle or whiskey? I have those covered.

    Restaurants?
    Pubs?
    Theatre?
    Live music?

    I’ll take any suggestions.

    1
  19. CSK says:

    @EddieInCA:

    Do visit The Scottish National Gallery.

    As for pubs, try Leslie’s Bar on Ratcliffe Terrace.

    Most of the restaurants I went to when I was living there have since closed, but try Henderson’s Salad Table for lunch if it still exists.

    1
  20. Kathy says:

    @Mister Bluster:

    My hypothesis is that the Domestic Door Anomaly screws up the fabric of space-time, rendering the speed of light for material objects to 0.01 m/s (photons are unaffected).

    Now reaching the speed of light, even diminished, is out of the question. At best a motivated human might manage half, or five millimeters per second. This does create relativistic effects, which explain why a person taking an unholy amount of time to traverse the anomaly doesn’t think it took them that long.

    There’s also the Workplace Spacewarp Anomaly. It’s different. Essentially it diverts time from useful work to make-work tasks or to various distractions, including doing someone else’s work.

    I ran into one yesterday. The boss gave me the price criteria for a project at 11 am. By 11:10 am I had the prices calculated from the master list, ready to sort and type into the proposal. Then the spacewarp struck, and I couldn’t finish the proposal until 1:30 pm. after the anomaly had dissipated.

    When a manager asked what took so long, I quoted Sheldon Cooper: Your quarrel, sir, is with the laws of physics.

    5
  21. Just nutha ignint crackeree says:

    @de stijl: First of all, I wouldn’t want hundreds. After that, you don’t launder it at all. You simply put it in a drawer and spend it over your lifetime. A cubic yard of money would last me, and as best as I can tell, I’ll never need any after I die, so the rest is surplus anyway.

    (For the record, no children and I’m the lowest net worth in my family.)

    3
  22. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @MarkedMan: I thought it was $5k now, but I don’t know anymore. I remember reading that Kent Hovind (of dinosaurs and men roamed the earth together fame) tried embezzling the funds from his “ministry” 5k at a time an got caught because they were all reported.

  23. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    In Lauren Boebert’s “announcement” yesterday, she noted

    “Now my son, when I approached him and told him, ‘Tyler, I’m going to be a 36-year-old grandmother,’ he said, ‘Well, didn’t you make Granny a 36-year old granny?'”

    I saw the headline and remembered that when I was in grad school, I substitute taught in Roslyn, Washington for a time and one day, a middle school student asked me how old I was. When I told him I was 39, he exclaimed “Wow! You’re even older than my grandfather!”

    Do the math. A middle school student is 13 or so which means that his grandfather was twenty-mumble when he was born. Or it might well be that the kid is innumerate. There was a fair amount of that in Roslyn as I recall. Either way, as I noted yesterday, welcome to my world.

    1
  24. de stijl says:

    @gVOR08:

    Cash deposits in the $9000 range get flagged, noted. Repeapeted once a day $9k cash deposits get law attention fast. That’s not the solution. You will get busted eventually. That type of behavior even has a shorthand name in the biz – structuring or stacking, something like that. “Structured deposits” I believe, iirc.

    Deposits above 10k are required to be reported, but there is rule against sharing data with the feds about all deposit and withdrawal activity and I guarantee you they do.

    There was a scam in the late 90s where cartels would identify easily coerced drug addled/alcoholic losers to buy a house with their cash and sell it a month later. That loophole has since been plugged. Last time I bought a house I had to provide proof that I legitimately had the cash. I used my phone to take pictures of financial statements.

    Real estate agents do not get enough love, btw. They are a one stop shop. Need a recommendation for a contractor, gardener, glazier, plumber, basement guy, kitchen guy, whatever, and b-bam they have a recommendation on hand. And generally good recommendations, too! They want repeat business and do not want to steer you to fly-by-night scummy operators. If you are working with a good realtor, chances very high they will steer you right, yeah they are getting a kickback, but from reputable folks that show up on time and do the required job with minimal hassle and do not ghost you halfway through. Everyone has a reputation to maintain.

    Realtors need more love. They do good work usually.

    (Realtor is a trademarked word. I don’t know all the law, but not all real estate agents are Realtors, but all Realtors are real estate agents. It’s accredation or something, not clear on the rules.)

    I get a Christmas card every year from my last real estate agent. She obviously outsourced that process, but it’s a smart marketing move.

    1
  25. charon says:

    @Stormy Dragon:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Attack_Helicopter

    The phrase “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter” is a transphobic Internet meme,[2][3] typically used, according to The Guardian, “to parody the evolving gender spectrum.”[4] The phrase originated as a copypasta on the Internet forum Reddit, which spread to other forums such as 4chan, where it was used (peaking in 2015) to mock transgender people.[5]

    Learn something new every day.

    1
  26. charon says:

    @charon:

    The meme was the basis for a story:

    “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” is a military science fiction short story by Isabel Fall, published on 1 January 2020 in Clarkesworld Magazine. The story relates the experience of Barb, a woman whose gender has been reassigned to “attack helicopter” so as to make her a better pilot. It was a finalist for the 2021 Hugo Award, under the title “Helicopter Story”.

    The story’s original title is taken from an Internet meme used to disparage transgender people. Some read the story as transphobic or as trolling, and at Fall’s request, Clarkesworld withdrew the story after Fall—a transgender woman—was harassed because of it. This caused a discussion among writers and critics about the merits of art that some perceive as hurtful.

    1
  27. Thomm says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker: an IRS form 8300 is required to be filled out for cash or cash-like transactions for 10k or more. A financial institution can also file them for lesser amount of they feel the transaction is odd or if the company has a lesser amount policy. It is not prepared in front of the customer and they do not sign it. Used to prep them up quite a bit as an f&i manager at a car dealership.

    1
  28. MarkedMan says:

    @CSK: Thanks for that. A few years ago he had an editorial somewhere that used thinly veiled cattle breeding language to all but openly vent his racist spleen. Not a peep from the media at large.

    I’ve told this here in the past but I had a unique window onto Buchanan years ago when I was tuning through the shortwave bands by kerosene lamp during my late eighties stint in the Peace Corps, searching for English language broadcasts. Occasional I would come across one from some crazed religious nut in the Deep South or in one of the square states who had raised enough funds to erect a giant antenna somewhere and cobble together a studio. As I roamed the dial I came across Buchanan’s voice and stopped. It quickly became apparent he was a guest on one of these Jesus/libertarian/racist programs, and while he never used overtly racist language himself he was quite happy to engage in a dialog of mutual admiration with someone who referred to blacks as mud people and miscegenation as a crime against god, and went into tangents about how mixing in the blood of the inferiors would inevitably destroy America.

    1
  29. CSK says:

    Steve Bannon says Elon Musk is owned by the Chinese Communist Party.

  30. Gustopher says:

    @Stormy Dragon:

    So apparently the real scandal at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital is that Jamie Reed was digging through the medical files of random patients she had no reason to be accessing, making a spreadsheets of people she thought weren’t really trans (despite not being a doctor, much less their doctor), and then sharing their PHI with right-wing politicians and “reporters”

    So… she’s a whistleblower?

    Step back from whether we believe her goals are good or evil (they’re evil, but let’s set that aside), and you have someone who sees something that they think is wrong happening at work, gathering information about it, and turning it over to the government and media that she trusts to investigate it.

    If she was recording chemical leaks, she would be praised. She would be called heroic.

    If she was recording a shocking number of removals of kidneys — even lacking the expertise to know whether it was unwarranted — she would be called brave.

    This isn’t the big story that deflates the entire narrative that you want it to be. It’s a story about her methods, which are “sloppy whistleblower”.

    She’s also a hate filled bitch, but it’s harder to quantify that.

    2
  31. Michael Cain says:

    @de stijl: Out of ignorance, what happens if you just say, “Went to the garage this morning and there was a pallet of cash”? Can you just decline to let anyone take it, declare it as income and pay the taxes?

    1
  32. MarkedMan says:

    @charon: There’s a really imaginative story I read some years ago that involved a character that was human but that identified as a space going battleship. In the end it made perfect sense that they did so and I had a lot of admiration for the sheer talent of the writer in pulling it off

  33. Sleeping Dog says:

    @CSK:

    We can run with that 😉

    1
  34. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Gustopher: Judging from what I read on…
    say, for example, posts about Rod Dreher, there seems to be enough hate-filled bitchiness to go around. Jus’ sayin’.

  35. CSK says:

    @MarkedMan:

    I’ve always had the sense that deep down, despite his laudatory references to the Judeo-Christian tradition, he really doesn’t like anyone who’s not Roman Catholic.

  36. Stormy Dragon says:

    @Gustopher:

    There is a reason why we, as a society, protect the privacy of patients, but there’s no equivalent “protected chemical spill information” category

    2
  37. de stijl says:

    @Michael Cain:

    That’s the rub. How do you legitimize the cash and stick it into a bank account without suspicion where you can do irl things with that money. Buy and staff a yacht. Whatever.

    The goal is to legitimize the cash and flow it into a bank account efficiently and quickly.

    That is a deliciously hard problem.

    I would never buy a boat. Boats are endless money sinks. The smallest kink in the armor means immediate disaster.

    If I were stupid rich I would buy a tourist rocket ride to orbital space. ISS or bust, baby! My job would be to help out the person looking after the plant experiments.

  38. de stijl says:

    If you inherited / came across a cubic yard of average packed bundles of hundred dollar bills, how much money is that?

  39. charon says:

    So I just finished “Stolen Youth” on Hulu, documentary about a cult preying on students at Sarah Lawrence. 3 segments, 1 hour each.

    Well worth while, if you are going to watch any such documentary, this is superior.

    2
  40. charon says:

    It seems Florida is becoming a pretty sucky place to live, especially if you own property.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/03/11/florida-insurance-claims-hurricane-ian/

    FORT MYERS, Fla. — When insurance adjuster Jordan Lee entered the cream-colored house battered by Hurricane Ian, the smell from the rain-soaked carpet made it hard to breathe. Piles of pink insulation covered the worn, white couches, he recalled, and poured from the collapsed ceiling, left gaping from the storm’s 150 mph winds. He photographed debris flecked on the carpet and walls, chunks of roof in the yard, and broken screens and gutters around a pool filled with palm fronds.

    The home, which belongs to retired couple Terry and Mary Sebastian, sits on a canal in Rotonda West, Fla., a coastal community that bore the brunt of Ian when the storm made landfall on Sept. 28. The entire place would need to be dehumidified, the roof completely replaced, the insulation torn out and the tattered pool enclosure rebuilt. It would be about $200,000 to repair the damage, the licensed adjuster calculated in his estimate for Heritage Property & Casualty Insurance Co.

    But when Lee checked in on his report about 10 days later, his stomach dropped, he said. It had been drastically whittled down, with entire portions, such as the one detailing issues in the primary bedroom, removed. The amount of insulation that needed to be redone was cut by half, and his estimate now said one-third of the roof should be fixed, instead of it being fully replaced. The homeowners were slated to receive a total of $27,000. The changes were made without Lee’s knowledge or consent, he said, but his name was still on the final report, according to documents seen by The Washington Post.

    After major disasters like Ian, insurance companies often bring on third-party firms like Tristar Claim Solutions, an independent adjusting company that Lee worked for as a contractor, to help with the hundreds of thousands of claims.

    During the insurance claims process, it’s standard for field adjusters, who are trained to assess damaged homes, to collaborate with those back in the office to make minor edits, discuss aspects of the claim and alter line items if, for example, the carrier has evidence that damage was from a prior event, according to adjusters and insurance industry experts. That is how the system is supposed to work.

    But that’s not what has been happening in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, Lee and others said.

    Instead, Lee and other adjusters contracted by regional insurance carriers say that managers have been changing their work by lowering totals, rewriting descriptions of damage and deleting accompanying photos without their approval. These actions to devalue damage are the latest example of the insurance crisis in Florida.

    After years of more frequent and intense storms, national carriers have pulled back from the market and smaller, regional carriers with smaller financial reserves jumped in. In the wake of Hurricane Ian, those companies have been aggressively seeking to limit payouts to policyholders by altering the work of licensed adjusters, according to a Post investigation. As a result, homeowners are left footing much of the bill for repairs, exposing an untenable gap between the cost of storm damage and what insurers are willing to pay to fix it.

    1
  41. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @CSK: Well, given that in Catholic theology and tradition, I’m a heretic who is doomed to hell, I wouldn’t be surprised about that being true.

    3
  42. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @de stijl: Given that your basic Haliburton briefcase will comfortably hold a million in 100s (1o stacks of 10 bundles each), I’m guessing something on the order of 10 billion or so. Probably more.

  43. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker: The repatriated “pallet load of cash” for Iran that Republiqans and other RWNJ types where whining about at the time of the nuclear treaty was roughly a cubic yard. How much was in that?

    1
  44. CSK says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker:

    I think it is true; Buchanan isn’t really happy nor comfortable around anyone who isn’t RC. I’ve gotten the same vibe from a few like him.

  45. de stijl says:

    @Just nutha ignint crackeree:

    You know who else needs public acknowledgment and applause is the workers in your county’s Coroner’s Office.

    When my mom died I was both heir and executor. I had to shut down or redirect all her accounts. Many / most required a certified death certificate.

    Sincere shout out to the folks in the Maricopa County Coroner’s Office. They did a major portion of the heavy lifting. And the funeral director. Seriously, no fooling, those people were God sent angels that made my life and that process substantially easier.

    If / when that happens to you here are the accounts that need to paying attention to:

    Electricity
    Water
    Gas
    Internet
    Cable TV
    HOA dues
    Lawn service
    City/state/US taxes
    Other

    It is daunting, hard work getting everything shut down properly. And most everyone requires proper documentation.

    Some companies / organizations have dedicated departments tasked to helping you, but that was fairly rare. It makes sense – customers die every day. Mostly, it was a big fucking hassle. Comcast was the worst by far. Pointless bullshit.

    Again, shout out to Maricopa County. Those folks saved my sorry butt a lot of work.

    One thing I never considered was just shutting down her main bank account. Next month service providers would attempt to hit her account for the monthly amount owed and would hit a void. An account that no longer existed.

    A friend floated that possibility months later and damn, that makes so much sense. I possibly wasted two months of my life butting heads with incalcitrant bureaucracy for no purpose.

    Just close the account. Let them figure it out. Just ignore all of them. That was the much more elegant solution my brain just totally missed. Their problem, not mine. I was so locked into one path so hard I missed the other.

    1
  46. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    If / when that happens to you

    Been there, done that. About 3o or so days after I returned from Korea, so roughly 7 years ago (closing the estate took most of a year). But my mom lived in a retirement home, so my experience was different from yours. In my case, the county department of vital records was the main agency. I never had any contact with the ME’s office at all because the funeral home issues the death certificate in my state. (At least, that is what I recall.) But yeah. Whoever does it is amazing.

    2
  47. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @de stijl: Also the law firm that did my parents’ estate was instrumental in organizing things. The account got frozen on the day after she died, and I actually needed a power of attorney to get access to the records because my brother had been the co-respondent (?) for the account but was not the estate representative.

    1
  48. de stijl says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker:

    I was at a department meeting and a guy showed up to say something. He had a Halliburton aluminum briefcase. It wasn’t subtle-he was hard-core sporting it as he walked in. That backfired, for me at least.

    I immediately judged him as a corporate asshole. We were in the mid stage of a major project. His message was to buckle down and work hard.

    I was right in my snap judgment. A know-nothing ignorant snooty asshole who provided zero value. Not all snap judgements are correct, but mine was. In that case, mine was 100% correct. I actually overestimated him. Dude was a useless chud that added unnecessary daily overhead. He made things objectively worse for everyone. That fucking briefcase, man. What’s in there? A sandwich? Your lunch?

    I like it when people tell you who they are with visual cues. It saves a lot of time and energy.

    I dismissed him immediately. And I was right to do so.

  49. Gustopher says:

    @Stormy Dragon: No one cares about HIPAA in a whistleblower case.

    If it was a story about patient neglect in a long term care facility, the number of HIPAA violations in the gathering of the evidence by the whistleblower wouldn’t be an issue — and that information would be needed. The long term care facility would be complaining about it as an obfuscation technique, but that’s it.

    How the information in this gender care clinic thing came to light isn’t going to be an issue that sinks the story. The fact that the information is shit might, if we are lucky.

    “Crazy lunatic woman shouldn’t have released private medical information” also just sounds like there is something to hide.

    “Crazy lunatic woman is a crazy lunatic, who released misinformed speculation about patients” is better. But, ironically harder to prove because of HIPAA.

  50. Gustopher says:

    @de stijl: I expect that crypto is going to factor into it. You want to create the appearance of wealth from nothing, and then swap that appearance of wealth with actual wealth.

    Find someone with a crypto wallet that has gained $X over the past N years, founded back at a point when you could have plausibly paid whatever the starting sum was, and then pay that person the value of the wallet plus a bit. You can buy a history of surprisingly fortunate trades which will hold up to close scrutiny.

    But, at some point you have to physically hand someone cash, and moving that cash around is going to be bulky.

    Or real estate, but that requires a larger upfront legitimate investment. Buy property below value officially, handing over some extra cash to make up the different, hold it for a while and sell.

    It is probably easier to find unscrupulous folks to help in crypto rather than the relatively well regulated real estate industry though.

  51. Erik says:

    @MarkedMan: you may be thinking of Ann Leckie’s “Ancillary” series where humans are turned into meat-robots for use by the AIs that run the warships. One of the ships knows she will be destroyed and downloads her memories into a meat robot. The rest of the series is the story of what happens to that AI in meat robot form

    1
  52. JohnSF says:

    Oh dear.
    England vs France: 10 – 53 “Historic humiliation”
    Worst ever home defeat. Third worst defeat EVER.
    An absolute tonking.
    France ripped us apart.
    Dammit.

  53. de stijl says:

    @de stijl:

    Is that a good solution? Just closing the main checking account? Letting all of the service providers set to autopay try and fail to debit a bank account that longer exists?

    Why is that potentially bad? That seems to be the smart solution that requires zero input or effort. The account you are trying to ping no longer exists so you cancel service. Which is what I wanted.

    Doesn’t that do everything I wanted to happen? Am I missing something? Just close the checking account and ignore most everything.

    Is it that simple?

    If so, man, I wasted a ton of effort, talk, and angst.

  54. Beth says:

    @de stijl:

    I tell my clients that if you hate your family buy a bunch of cars. Then have half of them titled correctly and the rest in close misspellings of your name and weird corporate entities. Make sure you shred corporate paperwork for max effect. Finally, make sure you leave just enough money to pay 2/3rds of the atty fee.

    Here in IL that would take months to years of deeply frustrating clean up work.

    2
  55. Pete S says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker:
    A bundle of 1000 100’s is about 6 inches by 6 inches by 2 inches. Not exactly but close. That’s 100k. 24 of those makes a cubic foot. $2.4m. So maybe $63M or so for the cubic yard? Is my math right here?

    1
  56. charon says:

    GOP and transgender

    Masha Gessen interview

    https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-trans-rights

    Masha, to hear many Republicans right now, you’d think that L.G.B.T.Q. rights are somehow as big a threat as the new Cold War, or nuclear war. I spoke with Michaela Cavanaugh, a Democratic state senator in Nebraska, who is fighting to block a bill that would withhold gender-affirming care from trans kids, including mental-health care. She told me that the Republicans with whom she legislates aren’t that worked up about trans rights, and that these bills are designed to get airtime on Fox News; they’re a kind of directive from the national party. That seems like a convenient argument for a Democrat who doesn’t want to make too many enemies among her Republican colleagues. What is the motivation for Ron DeSantis, for Donald Trump, for the Republican Party, to make this issue into something so enormous?

    I think I probably agree with the state senator a little bit, in the sense that all these bills are about signalling, and what they’re signalling is the essence of past-oriented politics. It’s a really convenient signal because some of the most recent and most rapid social change concerns L.G.B.T. rights in general, and trans rights and trans visibility in particular.

    All the autocratic politics that we see around the world right now are past-oriented politics. It’s Putin’s call for a return to “the great Russia” of the past. Note that Putin’s war in Ukraine goes hand in hand with extreme anti-L.G.B.T. rhetoric. In his last speech, he took time to assert that God is male, and that the crazy Europeans and the “Nazi” Ukrainians are trying to make God gender-fluid. I’m not kidding.

    And more …

    2
  57. de stijl says:

    @Beth:

    I didn’t even like my mom that much.

    Had been out of touch for years. I am not a pro so I cannot diagnose, but I believe strongly she was severely bipolar and know for certain she was untreated when I was under her direct care.

    Makes for a bad caretaker / parenting role.

    Hey, I learned to look after myself and cook for myself at a very young age which are good life skills. I just learned too young out of necessity.

    For the last few years she and I had a careful, cautious, gradual reconsideration about roles and communications. A cautious, baby step raproachment.

    Good for her. She straightened up. Got a job. Did fairly well for herself. I was happy for her.

    She kept her inner demons at bay and only shared her ugliness with me / at me in weird crazy phone calls. I’m impressed she was able to keep a job and excel at it without cracking. That takes guts and some resiliance. Good on her.

    Man, I could have saved two months of very annoying, frustrating bullshit just by closing her checking account. I was a fool.

  58. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Pete S: Don’t ask me. But looking around, I came up with 3 sources that said that 1 million in hundreds would be 689 cubic inches, which is, roughly 4/10 of a cubic foot. So about 2 1/2 million to the cubic foot and 27 cubic feet to a cubic yard would make seem to make 67.5 million, making your guess of by half or so and mine off by a couple of orders of magnitude.

  59. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Pete S: I should have gone back to your post because I was thinking that your guess was $34 million. My apologies! [egg on face emoji]

    1
  60. MarkedMan says:

    @Erik: That’s it. Thanks.