StrangeSox

They can and should be held accountable, but that doesn't mean that they need to have the same retention policies. Note that nowhere have I said that the six-month retention policy was good policy.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 26, 2014 -> 01:02 PM) It is a MUCH smaller burden than the retention policy the government forces on the trading industry though. They are required to save all emails, any recorded phone calls, any trading data, and all compliance information and supporting data. It dwarfs what the IRS requires of itself. It if a f***ing joke. The IRS no longer has a six-month retention policy, but there's no obvious reason that a regulatory agency needs to have the same records retention policies as the bodies it is regulating.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 26, 2014 -> 01:00 PM) Wasn't that 6 month policy only limited to non-work emails? I thought I read that work emails and non-work emails, or important work emails v. non-important work emails, were supposed to be kept longer and it was up to the discretion of the employee. Their IT archiving policy was to back everything up to tape, and then reuse those tapes after six months. There was also a limit of how large any one employee's email storage could be on the server side (500MB), so they couldn't just keep everything forever. When they got to that 500MB limit, the files could either be deleted or moved to your local computer. The archiving process didn't automatically delete any data, it's just a typical backup operation in case of a hardware failure. Given that the IRS has already turned over something around 80,000 emails from Lerner, I'm sure she was maxed out on her server-side storage. That meant that a lot of her email would have been stored locally, which is how it was lost when her drive crashed. So Lerner was keeping important work-related emails on her local computer, but her hard drive failed, as they sometimes do. The IRS attempted to recover what it could off of the drive when it crashed, but were unsuccessful. This all occurred back in 2011, well before the whole issue blew up. IT departments often don't get the funds they need to do the missions they're tasked with, and that's especially true with the government. That's not an argument that the IRS needs better funding, maybe they could have better utilized resources or made IT a higher priority, but they didn't have the resources to keep indefinite backups of all of the emails of 90,000 employees. If you're instead relying on some of those emails being stored on 90,000 individual machines, you're going to have a decent amount of hard drive failures and loss of data. The WaPo details it more here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fi...ss-lois-lerner/

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 26, 2014 -> 12:05 PM) The federal government has a six month retention policy? Are you kidding me? They require the financial industry to save almost all records for 3-7 years. The IRS itself requires 7 years of tax retention. What a f***ing joke. The IRS had a six-month retention policy on emails. It changed that somewhat recently. I don't know if the old retention policy violated any sort of legal requirements such as FOIA. I've seen conservatives in the comments section on sites like Volokh saying it did, but no actual citation. I don't know what other federal agency retention policies are or were. Saving every email of all 90,000 employees is not the same thing as saving tax records.

They had a 6 month retention period. It's pretty easy to delete things after 6 months when that's what your archive policy explicitly calls for. Once it was deleted from the archive tapes, the only place the emails might still reside would be on an individual computer, and there's no retention/backup requirements there. I have lost about 3 months worth of work emails the exact same way. They were old enough that they were outside of the server retention period, and then my hard drive crashed, losing any of the local copies I might have had. Whether or not the 6 month retention policy was good policy is a separate question, but it isn't a question of malice or cover up. Lehrner's hard drive crashed before there were any congressional inquiries. The closest thing is a letter that was sent 10 days prior to the crash, but was not very specific. There's contemporaneous documentation of her reporting the crash and the IRS's attempts at recovery of the lost data on the drive back in 2011.

game might be delayed due to heavy rains and flash floods http://www.espnfc.com/fifa-world-cup/4/vid...threatens-delay

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 25, 2014 -> 09:50 AM) So is there a threshold then of when you use that kind of language that you become the racist/bigoted f***? I'm a little confused. Jonah Hill - 1, not enough. Gibson/Baldwin, 2-3+, definitely racist/bigoted f***s. So everyone gets one free pass? And yeah, Bill Mahr is criticized, I guess. But he's still got his soap box. Mel was run out of town (rightly or wrongly, i'm not defending him). Something I just read reminded me that Bill Maher did, in fact, lose his soap box for a while and went from network television to cable pay channels. And how about the Dixie Chicks being kicked off of most of the radio and out of a lot of record stores for daring to criticize Bush?

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 25, 2014 -> 01:40 PM) The question is, will Anthony Kennedy be willing to go so far as to follow all these rulings or will he attempt to come up with some crazy nonsensical middle ground? I've read a couple of the opinions and analysis of them, and it seems like he'd have to undermine his own ruling in Windsor to do so at this point.

Also, the decision was effectively immediately with no stay entered and couples have already begun marrying: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-...-sex-marriages/

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 25, 2014 -> 01:17 PM) Utah's overturning today just was the first time a federal appeals court to rule in favor of marriage equality since the Prop 10 case last year. Yeah, so far it's still mostly been at the district level and it's working its way through the appeals courts. My mistake. Still, if the string of rulings holds at the appellate level, there won't be much for SCOTUS to say.

Unanimous ruling at that. Police cannot search cellphones or smartphones after an arrest without a warrant. http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/06/opinion-...for-cellphones/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-...cance-of-riley/ I like Roberts' line here: Pretty sure he dropped the mic and walked off the stage after that line.

I said it after the last wave, but with all of the federal circuit courts ruling the same way so far, I wonder if SCOTUS will ever even take it up. If all of the courts are just applying Windsor and doing so in the same manner, there's not really much more for SCOTUS to say.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 25, 2014 -> 01:07 PM) yes, but for all intents and purposes that is part of the payroll tax on the employee that is just effectively hidden from the employee because that's the way we do our silly bookkeeping. But again, the employee is either on the books and getting a paycheck with payroll tax deductions, or they're being paid cash off the books. I can't think of a scenario where an employer would be paying an undocumented worker through a formal payroll system that collects and then pays payroll taxes out of their paychecks but somehow avoids the payroll taxes owed on those wages by the company and nobody at the IRS notices. I could be wrong, but that seems like instant, obvious red flags to me.

Yes, the world is not binary. Saying a racist or bigoted thing or even believing in that ideology for a while but eventually realizing why it's wrong and changing is a good thing. Being a pretty much unrepentant asshole or someone who's completely oblivious that what they're saying is racist or bigoted is different. When you have a pattern of s***ty behavior and show no signs of recognizing it and working to correct it, you're going to be called out for being a s***head. It's not that complicated. edit: a weird contradiction on part of Oldman's argument is that Baldwin is generally a pretty outspoken liberal but caught a lot of flack for his anti-gay slurs. That sort of undermines the whole "liberals get a free pass" claim.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 25, 2014 -> 09:43 AM) If a worker is voluntarily sending in "Federal income taxes" wouldn't it basically be the payroll tax that they're sending in as that's a much larger fraction of their total tax paid? The idea is that someone is undocumented but working with a fake/fraudulent SSN. As far as the employer is concerned, they're like any other documented employee. They're put into payroll, they're counted just like everyone else and both sides pay payroll taxes. If the guy sitting at the desk across from me is actually here on an expired visa or working under a legitimate-but-someone-else's SSN, we're both getting the same payroll deductions every paycheck and our employer is paying the same payroll taxes. It's just that, come next April, he's probably not going to be filing his tax return because he doesn't have a legit tax ID and it'd just draw attention to himself. If they're being paid off the books, nobody is paying any taxes on it period. It's straight cash, and the company that's paying people under the table isn't going to be making payroll tax deductions from their cash payments. How would they even report and pay those for those not-on-the-books employees without also having to pay their share of the same taxes? And why would an undocumented person working off the books file a tax return? Again, I'll go back to my brother who hasn't reported some of his income for a couple of years now. He works strictly for cash. He's not paying any income or payroll taxes. He doesn't file a tax return because there's no W-2. His employer isn't deducting anything from his "$100 to go do this" rate. I'm not sure how that'd be managed on the business expenses side of things as a deductible expense, but nobody's paying income or payroll taxes on that money.

No, I don't think so. Oldman didn't choose to defend Jonah Hill, though. He picked Gibson and Baldwin. He also used Bill Maher as an example of someone who doesn't get criticized, but he catches plenty of s*** for generally being a misogynist and an asshole.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 25, 2014 -> 09:28 AM) But the balance changes a whole lot when you actually count the payroll tax. His number $24k is a person who, if being paid as a normal worker and paying payroll taxes, would be paying a pretty solid amount to the federal government even after counting the EITC because of the payroll tax hit. Yes, they would. I don't think Tex would dispute that, but it doesn't directly relate to the point he was making. Tex was, if anything, countering the idea that undocumented immigrants pay no taxes and are a net drain. At least that's how I read it. A question in response: how would an off-the-book undocumented worker be paying payroll taxes in the first place? My brother does cash side jobs for a buddy of his. It's all off-payroll, so his employer doesn't pay any payroll taxes and neither does he (nor does he report that as taxable income, either). If Walmart is hiring undocumented workers to their regular payroll and issuing a W-2 (this would require a fake/fraudulent SSN or tax ID for the undocumented worker), how can Walmart avoid paying their share of the payroll taxes associated with that W-2? On the other hand, if it's non-payroll cash payments to undocumented workers, why on earth would the workers be voluntarily sending in payroll taxes? How would they even be doing that?

Oldman chose to champion Mel Gibson. Oldman said this: No, we all haven't. Maybe Oldman is just as much of a racist, bigoted f*** as Gibson is and is just projecting what he says or thinks in private on to everyone else. Not everyone slips into disgusting racism or antisemitism when they're drunk, just racists and antisemites.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 25, 2014 -> 09:23 AM) I'll consider giving you the unemployment tax, but Payroll and Social Security? Come on, that's a tax paid per employee. If the company fires its employee that removes those taxes they would have paid on that worker. That's an income tax by another name. Is the tax incidence rate really 100% though? Don't fall for the old argument that "all taxes/regulatory burdens/expenses on a business are passed on to the consumer/employee" because in most cases, it's not possible to pass it on 100%.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 25, 2014 -> 09:14 AM) I know, but when you count the payroll tax you would fundamentally rewrite that post. Even if an immigrant is paying their share of the payroll tax, if they're undocumented, the employer is not paying the hidden half so the employer is making out like a bandit, and even a low income employee will contribute to the government through the payroll tax which funds a solid chunk of the government these days anyway. How would that work? If the undocumented worker isn't working for cash under the table but is legitimately on the payroll and paying payroll taxes, the employer is going to have that on their books and will need to pay the payroll taxes as well. If they are being paid cash and not filing a W-2, then nobody is paying payroll taxes. I think it either has to be both pay or neither pay. Anyway, Tex's point was that if someone is working under a fraudulent SSN or tax ID number, it's actually a net benefit to the government revenue stream. That low-income worker would normally file their taxes and get EITC, probably getting most or all of their income taxes back. If they're undocumented, they probably aren't going to be filing a tax return, so that money never gets refunded.

Eh, I already made that point earlier in the thread and don't think that was the argument Tex was making at all.

Q1 GDP shrank by 2.9%, not the 1% previously estimated. http://www.cnbc.com/id/101787838

Everyone has said awful things. Not everyone says or even thinks internally that their wife should be "raped by a pack of n*****s." That's not about "political correctness" unless you're defining political correctness as not being a bigoted s***head. Not everyone actually thinks horribly racist, homophobic or sexist remarks in private. edit: holy s*** the auto-filter blocks "s***" but not "n*****s"

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 25, 2014 -> 08:39 AM) And as always, the $2000 that they pay to the government as payroll tax (and the additional portion of the payroll tax paid by their employer) doesn't count. tex did specify "federal income tax"

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Jun 25, 2014 -> 08:39 AM) Or the person whose number they are using gets screwed out of a refund because the $20k the illegal made pushed the citizen over the threshold for getting a refund. Or the IRS comes calling wanting to know why they didn't report that extra $20k in income on their taxes. I am skeptical that this actually happens. There would be two W-2's and it would be pretty obvious what was going on right away.