Gotta catch 'em all!

Well, maybe not all, every trainer knows you can't catch humans. Why bother trying?

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assert that actual expats know more about the process than the average US-only citizen.

But if you'd prefer, here's WaPo saying the same damned thing. Happy?

Yep, we 100% agree that's how to report realized gains or losses. Now name another capital asset (HUD forms and excise tax notwithstanding, obviously) that you're taxed on receipt rather than just on disposition.

I have no idea how that's even supposed to work, and I'm seriously trying to stay legal (a few grand a year isn't worth prison time). Neither Schedule D nor 8949 make a lick of sense unless you have a value for the "Proceeds" column - Which you don't have unless you've sold something. And sure, go ahead and put a huge unsubstantiated number on your schedule 1 line 8 and see how well that goes for you.

Pretty much the only way I've figured out to comply with that ridiculous requirement is to make a semi-fake wash "sale" of each new year's new mining payouts every December 31st - Which itself is a grey area but since it would always be a gain, never a loss, it's technically kosher; so at least if I get a CP2501 or similar I'll have paid "enough" taxes already and any penalties would be $0.

The IRS is, bluntly, trying to play both sides of the fence on this one. They're treating crypto as money on receipt, and as property on disposition. And have given us no reasonable way to reconcile that discrepancy.

That's not possible to do at the moment.

And it was fairly difficult even before the pandemic. It's like getting divorced from the judge overseeing the divorce itself, and goes down pretty much exactly the way you'd expect.

Taxes on what, exactly?

As the haters are so quick to point out, crypto isn't money. Until an exchange occurs between crypto and fiat (or something meaningfully measurable in fiat), Uncle Sam has absolutely no say in the matter.

Or to put that another way, taxing bitcoin is the single most legitimizing action the government could take as regards crypto. And if crypto is legit, fiat... Isn't.

And yes, for the record I fully realize we technically owe taxes even on bartered goods and services. Unless you're eBay, though, the way the IRS measures that simply doesn't work. If I buy a car with bitcoin, sure, FMV is easy. If I exchange two thinly-traded altcoins... It's a complete farce to say that either side should pay taxes, and even the IRS can't tell you how to measure the FMV of that transaction (go ahead, call their help line - I did in 2019, and the response was crickets).

You're missing the point, but so is the SEC.

My company recently switched from using totally unlogged Skype to fully logged Teams. Take a wild guess what percent of casual conversations between coworkers now occur via secure 3rd party channels that HR (or PHBs) can't intimidate IT into turning over. I'll give you a hint - I don't even know if my Teams client is still working since we got 21H2.

The problem here isn't a technical or legal problem, it's a human one. Until someone can guarantee me that my chat transcripts can't be touched without my knowledge and a court order... Sorry, but the likelihood of getting caught using my own personal phone to chat with coworkers doing the same is simply much, much lower than the likelihood of having HR use those exact transcripts to go fishing during the next "right-sizing".

as a kid, i built one of dave mao's presses. it's deceptively simple for what it does.

it's basically a stack of belleville washers leveraging a pair of tongs.

you can create different pressures depending on the way you stack the washers, which are essentially springs.

i didn't have the cash for the diamonds, but it worked. if i kept it, i could probably buy diamonds for it.

A old friend of mine is a climate scientist (Ph.D. in mathematics and weather modeling.) He spent many a year at some of the advanced arctic and antarctic research bases doing climate research.

He left the field some years ago over the politics in the scientific community: too much infighting and not enough science. That's a problem throughout the scientific community, really. The less your proposed research is perceived to fit in with the prevailing ideas the more other scientists will try to stymie your work, and the less your chances of gaining any funding.

His comment to me once was that climate science is an inexact science, that there is an incredible amount of noise in the system, and thus it's very difficult to achieve a theoretical basis that has any significant predictive ability.

That's not how it's portrayed in the media though, they tend to speak in absolutes. Not that American science reporters have ever done anything but an abysmal job informing the public. It's more sensationalism and the art of manipulation than actual reporting. I remember watching some Fox News program where a panel was discussing how untrustworthy scientists are because they're always changing things (thereby evincing a complete lack of understanding of the iterative nature of scientific research, that it is a process of continual refinement) and the token black guy says "I think it's important to just pick a study that supports what you believe" and everyone else just nodded and smiled.

Dafuq?

I think that was why Google's G+ social network had to go. It was connecting too many ordinary citizens with actual scientists and other highly-educated people, allowing them to completely bypass mainstream media on important issues such as climate change. What also impressed me was how many of those researchers and professional people of all stripes were more than willing to answer questions from lay people and answer them in understandable terms. I will never forgive Google for terminating that platform, and doing so with the lame excuse of "we had a security problem." They did us a disservice by doing so.

That presented a problem for those in power however. People began to perceive the difference between official narratives and what the people doing the actual research were saying. I often wonder how different the pandemic response would have been had G+ still been in full operation.

They correctly point out nothing in that context: the West wasn't "allowed" to industrialize and pollute (as if China or anyone else could have stopped that process) it just did what it wanted within its own territories, as did everyone else. The West just figured out how to do it over a century before anyone else, and China and India are simply playing off of the West's initial advantage. One could argue, however, that China, India and other regional powers are being "allowed" to pollute because both were enabled by Western corporatism and its willingness to sell out its own citizenry and shift its manufacturing base to the third-world.

The elephant in the room here is not actually that human civilization and concomitant industrialization cause pollution. No, in fact it is overpopulation, and that is the sole province of the third world. Not that I see many willing to talk about that: no, it's always the United States that is the source of all the world's ills, even when that's just not the case. Were it not for the flood of illegal aliens crossing our southern border, the U.S. would be in a population decline (as is much of Europe.)

That said, you are absolutely correct about poorer nations having little vision of the future, other than trying to achieve a high-energy, high-resource-utilization Western lifestyle for as many of their citizens as possible, even if the collapse of human civilization is brought that much closer.

That's hysterical. I just made a similar comment about that particular Roland Emmerich film but calling it a documentary is genius.

Great. So you're telling me that Roland Emmerich was right? Oh well ... I always figured one of his end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it scenarios would come true sooner or later.

Wait until Alexandria Occasionally-Cortical hears about this.

The problem is, if you kill off too many of the right people (that is, those that develop and maintain the technology that the plebs need to survive) everyone dies anyway. What we need is a good selective plague.

I hope you don't live in New York City.

I'm not sure that China's numbers are accurate: they lie about pretty much everything to do with internal statistics so they're not to be trusted.

Regardless, the civilized West is losing population, indeed many European nations are in a population decline, as is the United States (or would be, were it not for illegal migration.) China currently has almost five times America's population, more people than the U.S. and Europe combined. Worse yet, they have a burgeoning middle class that wants all the cool stuff they can get, from gigatons of fresh seafood stolen from other nation's territorial waters to air conditioning to the very latest i-thing from Apple. China may (or may not) be able to reduce their climate emissions, but they sure as Hell aren't going to be able to reduce their resource consumption. Not if the CCP wants to stay in power.