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Getting Down to Brass Tax

From Darwinfish2:

There are now three guaranteed certainties in this life, Death, Taxes, and Republicans trying to get out of paying taxes. I saw this a couple weeks ago and it got me thinking:

First, I don’t know who was “crying” about Elon Musk buying Twitter instead of “solving” world hunger. Yeah, it would have been nice for a guy like Musk to spend some of his excessive dough on projects that would better our surroundings. And he likes to pose as quite the philanthropist, but I think he prefers his vanity projects.

And since when can $80 billion “solve” world hunger? There are far too many factors and variables to make it so that no one is ever hungry again. $80 bil wouldn’t make a dent. It may help a select group of people for a finite amount of time, but that’s not a solution. A serious solution would look too much like Socialism and that’s the last thing people who like this meme would want. Or, it might look like this idea from the 80s:

“It occurred to me that there wouldn’t be world hunger if you people would live where the FOOD IS!”

But I was really more interested in the IRS bit. This Democrat is thrilled that the IRS is getting rejuvenated. The last administration was keen to let the whole organization whither on the vine and die so that the richest among us could still use all the tax lawyers at their disposal to ensure that the national tax burden rested on the rest of us, and not them.

I don’t think the IRS is interested in chasing down us commoners for audits. Where’s the payoff in that? (Other than enjoying the sadism.)

If I’m a guy working for the IRS and I want to produce results, where do I look? I look where the money is, with the rich, and not with the working stiffs. Chasing down the average citizen is a waste of time and resources. I’d want to be able to say to my boss at review time, “I recovered X-dollars’ worth of unpaid taxes,” where “X” is the largest number possible.

Republicans know this, probably because their rich donors pound it into their heads, so they want the IRS to be as under-manned, under-funded, and under-equipped as possible. So when the new funding bill wanted to bolster the T-men, they figured they need to get the commoners good and scared about getting audited by gun-packing federal agents. It’s the tax equivalent of the “death squads” they trotted out to make everyone afraid of Obamacare, and just as misleading.

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A.I. Generated…

Grace Jones Surfing

Kraftwerk Surfing

(I especially like the podiums.)

I also asked for “Donald Trump in a Noose” in anticipation of his espionage conviction, but as lovely as the results were, I think posting them might cross the line even for this blog.

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Oh, How I’ve Missed You

The last time I bought a dedicated CD player new was 21 July 1990. How do I know that exact date? I kept scrupulously-detailed journals. I also have photos from when my mom was visiting me in San Francisco at the time and I remembered that I picked it up while she was there.

Have I mentioned I’m a little anal-retentive?

It was a Yamaha CDX-730. I’d gotten an unexpected mid-year bonus at work.

I kept this little deck around for about ten years, when I lost my mind and thanks to eBay, started swapping gear in and out of my rig on what seemed like a monthly basis. I tried a couple different Sony decks (including a combo CD/Minidisc), a vintage Technics deck (the one I originally wanted to buy in 1985 but missed out on because the model year had changed), another more recent Technics model, a Teac deck, and then back to a Yamaha—this time the CDX-530—the little brother to the 730, which I kept for several more years until I’d ripped everything to iTunes and stopped playing CDs altogether.

(My teachers always complained about my run-on sentences. Sorry.)

In the years that followed, I ended up selling nearly all of my extensive CD collection. The ones I kept had sentimental value for one reason or another, and were relegated to a banker box in the closet; ultimately the closet that ended up suffering the most damage in the fire two years ago.

To their credit, the firefighters pulled most everything out of that closet before they started spraying everything down, but that box was lost in the aftermath. I didn’t even give it a thought until a month later when I realized it was not among the things inventoried by the salvage company and was, for all intents, gone.

Every time I thought of that my heart sank. Even though I never played those CDs—hell, I didn’t even have anything to play them on at that point—they still held immense sentimental value.

A couple weeks ago (yes, two years on and I was still mourning their loss) I decided to stop crying about this and do something. So I went on eBay, located a “near mint” Yamaha CDX-530, and ordered the first two replacement CDs in my collection: Kraftwerk’s Minimum/Maximum and Pet Shop Boys’ Very/Relentless. The deck and the Kraftwerk disk arrived yesterday. I hooked it into my system and just laid back and enjoyed the music.

For the last ten years or so I’ve been in the “vinyl just sounds better” camp, but frankly after hearing Minimum/Maximum (something I will never be able to afford to buy on vinyl) on a system that I’ve never heard a CD played through, I may have to revise that opinion a bit. Both formats have their strengths and weaknesses, but Kraftwerk sounded damn good.

Fortunately—thanks to that anal-retentiveness—I have a list of [most of]  those CDs. The document is dated 2013 and I know I purchased a few more since then to rip to iTunes, but it’s a great starting point to rebuild my collection.