Woohoo!

I.R.S. Deploys Artificial Intelligence to Catch Tax Evasion

The tax agency is opening examinations into large hedge funds, private equity groups, real estate investors and law firms.

Watch the fur fly! (You may not be able to read this NYTimes OpEd — paywall — but just the headline is enough. Furious Congressional investigations of AI! 

Which will give them something to do while they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing, which is their jobs.

Congress just came back from vacation and right away we're faced with another shut-down-the-government budget crisis. 

For when caffeine is not enough?

 

But it must be brutal

Poverty Simulation Event

Join the Highland Park community to increase your understanding and awareness of what it feels like to live in poverty in Lake County.

Date and time
Saturday, September 9 · 9 - 11:30am CDT

Location
Highland Park Country Club

Highland Park, IL (this Highland Park), is a bedroom suburb located about 25 miles north of Chicago on the Lake Michigan shore. According to the web site 247wallst.com…

Highland Park, Illinois, is one place where the median household income is more than double the national figure. The typical household in the area earns $153,226 a year, the 50th highest among all cities with sufficient data and 122.0% more than the national median.

 I've never been to the Highland Park Country Club.

Today's serving of angst

 Tennis ball wasteland? Game grapples with a fuzzy yellow recycling problem

Because tennis balls are extremely hard to recycle and the industry has yet to develop a ball to make that easier, nearly all of the 330 million balls made worldwide each year eventually get chucked in the garbage, with most ending up in landfills, where they can take more than 400 years to decompose. It’s a situation highlighted by Grand Slam events like Flushing Meadows, which will go through nearly 100,000 balls over the course of the tournament.

No matter how much you worry you do not worry enough.

Elsewhere I read about a purported de-decluttering movement ("Our obsession with purging is bad for the planet and making us ashamed of our homes" –Washington Post), a new outbreak of math anxiety ("Math is hard, even for teachers" –Associated Press), women wearing dresses over jeans ("I can't go through this era again" –New York Post), and, of course, the weather ("The summer of 2023 was the hottest on record" –Reuters).

It's a crisis crisis out there and I haven't even had breakfast yet.

Do they know which way is up?

 Inflation just keeps going down and down, they say.

Nonetheless…

The typical household spent $202 more in July than they did a year ago to buy the same goods and services, tweeted Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi. "And they spent $709 more (in July) than they did two years ago."

–USA Today

["Inflation going down" does not mean prices are going down. It means prices are going up more slowly.]

Speaking of Reality TV

Chicago TV news crew robbed at gunpoint while reporting on a string of robberies

The episode was the second robbery this month involving a Chicago news crew, after a WLS-TV photographer was assaulted and robbed on Aug. 8 while preparing to cover a weekday afternoon news conference on Chicago’s West Side, the station reported.

 Reality TV — hopefully not quite that real — looms large as the industry plunges into a Fall season with writers and actors on strike. 

I'm wondering if the Trump Trials. assuming they wind up being televised, will be eligible for an Emmy.

Fortunately — deliciously — Trump resigned his membership in the Screen Actors Guild in 2021, so he can't claim to be on strike himself. 

Not taking sides here

Really. Not. Just commenting on the fecklessness (I want to say fecklessisity but I'm pretty sure that's not a word) in our fetish for legislation and pursuing justice with a blindfold on.

To wit, this from a recent NPR piece:

Tarrio [an ex-Proud Boys leader [sic] currently facing a substantial prison sentence for seditious conspiracy] wasn't at the actual Capitol riot because he had been arrested days earlier for setting fire to a Black Lives Matter banner, stolen from Asbury United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C., and was ordered out of the city.

[Emphasis mine.] 

While it is, as the Supreme Court has clearly proclaimed, perfectly legal to burn an American flag.

From LawInfo:

The Supreme Court has tried to define “free speech” in several of its opinions. Basically, it stated that “speech” covers areas beyond talking and writing. The court interpreted the First Amendment to apply to symbolic expressions such as burning flags, burning crosses, wearing armbands, and the like.

And note, Tarrio's punishment for said misbehavior consisted solely of being hustled out of D.C., which might not be an entirely bad thing — and certainly better than being tossed in the slammer. But still I remain a little confused by this. 

Where does it end?

The other day I fell heir to a nice dish of leftover pizza and by this morning I had forgotten about it entirely and ate oatmeal.

Shakespeare observed that getting old was to wind up "sans hair, sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything." Apparently everything includes pizza for breakfast.

Whisked

Thousands more Mauritanians are making their way to the US, thanks to a route spread on social media

As word of the entry point spreads, travel agencies and paid influencers have taken to TikTok to promote the trip, selling packages of flights that leave from Mauritania, then connect through Turkey, Colombia and El Salvador, and wind up in Managua, Nicaragua. From there, the migrants, along with asylum seekers from other nations, are whisked north by bus with the help of smugglers.…

The trip can cost $8,000 to $10,000, a hefty sum that some families manage by selling land or livestock.

I'm not opposed to immigration or, certainly, granting people asylum when it's appropriate. 

It just seems we should figure out some better way to do it than requiring people to put up $10 grand to get whisked.

What took them so long?

Berlin Wall relic gets a ‘second life’ on US-Mexico border as Biden adds barriers

TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — As the U.S. government built its latest stretch of border wall, Mexico made a statement of its own by laying remains of the Berlin Wall a few steps away.

Dateline today, Sept. 3.

I saw the Iron Curtain up close and personal on the border between Austria and Czechoslovakia a long time ago. It wasn't a wall in the way the wall in Berlin was; it was concertina wire, land mines, and, about 200 yards away over flat, bare land, watchtowers. It was there to keep people from leaving the Soviet Union. It was also there to keep me out.

It's always made me more than a little uncomfortable to be living in a country with a border wall of its own.

When life gives you mud, splash around in it

Burning Man flooding strands tens of thousands

Those who remained Sunday described a resilient community making the most of the mucky conditions: Many posted selfies of themselves covered in mud, dancing or splashing in the makeshift lakes.

Maybe there's hope after all.