For me it shows “Golf of America” unless you zoom out, in which case it shows “Golf of Mexico (Golf of America)”

Edit: something is being silly and not letting me post 2 different pictures, so here is the zoomed out one.

A typical employee would have taxes taken out of every paycheck. Employers calculate that assuming they are your only source of income and you have nothing interesting going on tax wise, which is correct for 90% of people. Employees can ask for their income tax withholding to be changed and employers will do so no questions asked [1]. At the end of the year, you’re employer will give you a form W2 that says how much they payed you, how much they paid in taxes on your behalf, how much they payed into your tax deductible account on your behalf, etc. Basically everything about your job that is tax relevant. A copy of this W2 form is sent to the IRS.

If you have investment accounts, work as an independent contractor, or various other forms of income, you will generally be given a form 1099. Again, a copy of this will be sent to the IRS. Income tax is not automatically withheld from these, so if you get a lot of income through them, you may owe taxes at the end of the year.

You may also qualify for tax deductions that lower your effective income for the purposes of computing your income tax. For instance, the interest on you mortgage, charitable donations, etc. However if you choose not to claim these, you can instead claim a deduction of about $14,000; which is more than most people would be able to deduct anyway, so there often isn’t a point of keeping track of these.

There are a couple of less common situations that you may need to deal with

1. You can deduct significantly more than the standard deduction, so actually need to keep track of all of your possible deductions.

2. You are self employed. In this case, you need to keep track of your business expenses, as those are deductible. You also do not have anyone taking out your income tax for you, so you are responsible for making sure you have enough saved come tax time (these tend to be the people who have problems). You are also supposed to pay taxes quarterly.

3. You have a significant amount of income that is not from a single W2 employer. This can be multiple W2 jobs, 1099 jobs, investment income, proceeds from criminal activity, etc.

4. You make a significant amount of money from unreported cash tips. (In practice, you can underreport this and no one will know).

5. You choose to deduct your state’s sales tax instead of your states income tax; and do so by actually tracking how much you pay in sales tax instead of estimating it based on your income.

Having said all of that. For 99% of taxpayers, the IRS knows exactly how much you owe; because all of your income was reported to them, as was your only significant deductions, and nothing else matters because you just take the standard deduction for the rest. The IRS could send you a bill/refund based on this and let the remaining 1% file if the IRS gets it wrong. However, that would collapse the tax preparation industry, so companies like TurboTax have lobbied against it for years.

What actually happens instead is you go to TurboTax, upload all of the forms that were sent to the IRS, and let them file taxes on your behalf. This service was “free” until they were sued for false advertising on account of charging money.

[0] At least for income tax. There’s a few other taxes on payroll that you cannot change.

[1] Assuming you asked in the form of a properly filled out W4.

He doesn’t. However, that is only according to this pesky technicality called “the law”. If the President does not want to follow the law, and appoints people who also do not care for following the law, then the law stops being a thing to look for for authority; and Musk can do this because Trump says he can.

In the short term, expect this to be shut down by the courts. In the medium term, a bunch of these orders will end up in front of the Supreme Court that unironically said “if the president does it, it might be illegal, but he is absolutely immune from prosecution”. Even if the SC come down on the only legally defensible position, Trump could still say “them and what army”

This is 100% a coup by Trump to centralize power in the executive. When staging a coup, “authority” is merely an inconvenience.

Optimistic of you to think we’ll all make it to next time. I’m on that list several times already.

By private companies. Federal employees have a lot more protections.

By saying “common”, we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming

That policy is surprisingly on point.

Mutual funds are a systemic risk by being dumb money. Normally this is talked about in the context of index investing. The more money blindly tracks an index, the more that index becomes detached from reality. This causes measurable inefficiencies in the market [0]. In practice, this isn’t that big of a deal, since “follow the index” essentially means “do what the smart money does”, so the distortion is not that great.

In the context of voting, the analogous action would be abstaining (or voting with the majority of voting active shareholders). I suspect the reason this is not done is a combination of there not being enough active voting shareholders (as you say, that is why boards are a thing), and the risk of activist investors.

On a much smaller scale, we have something similar happening in my local HOA. The county owns about a dozen units as part of it’s public housing program. Combined with the low turnout at HOA meetings, and the 1 property = 1 vote, this means that they could vote for essentially anything they want.

In practice, their policy is to show up to all meetings but abstain from votes unless they are needed to make a quarum. If they are needed, they vote for whatever the consensus was among every else there.

[0] See the index effect. Being added to an index increases a stock’s value, despite there being no change to the underlying fundamentals.

They are working with the Palestinian Authority, which is generally recognized as the government of Palestine.

The president ordered it. There is no legal mechanism to compel private companies to use the new name.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-names-that-honor-american-greatness/

Reading the orders, the gender one is much more impactful.

Canceling DEI programs cancels those programs, which just isn’t that impactful. Maybe it slows or reverse progress on equality at the population level. But an individual is not going to notice a difference (unless they were explicitly working in administering it). Further, those DEI programs were only for federal agencies, which are going to have a much bigger culture shift from the coming idealougical and loyalty purge. Minorities are still protected by strong anti discrimination laws and the 14th amendment.

The anti trans order, in contrast, declares that trans people don’t exist. And the entirety of the federal government must act accordingly. This will have a direct effect on every openly trans person in the country. Further, the legal protections trans people have are based entirely on an interpretation of gender discrimination laws that the current Supreme Court seems unlikely to endorse; and which Trump has directed the Attorney General to not follow.

The electoral college was entirely a compromise to protect the interest of the slave holding states.

The US has a separate mechanism to prevent run offs. If no one wins the election in the first round, the House of Representatives gets to ignore the election entirely and pick whoever they want as president. In another nod to slave states, this vote is done by state declaration, unlike every other vote the House conducts, where each individual member gets to vote.

If they wanted to have a popular vote for the president, they could have easily done so within the logistical constraints of the time. States still send an electoral delegation to the capital to submit. However, instead of those delegations voting, they simply report their state’s election results. Then, the President of the Senate tallies all the state results and announces the result. If no one wins a majority, we fall back on our current stupid procedure in the House of Representatives.

There’s been reporting for months that the hostage families have been frustrated with Netenyahu for not getting a hostage release deal, as they think Netenyahu sabotaged perfectly acceptable deals that Hamas has agreed to.

Once you are already angry at him for, at best keeping your loved one trapped for a year longer than necessary, and very possibly killed, then it is a relatively short distance to cross to say that those policies are also war crimes.

When was that house built? What should the current owners do with it? If they sell, someone else needs to buy. Someone is going to be left holding the bag for a decision made decades ago.

And our current approach already indemnifies them, because their flood insurance is provided by the federal government as no private insurer will offer it. Then, when a flood hits, we all pay for it, along with the emergency response during and after the event.

The problem is that people cannot simply get out at scale. The homes themselves are not portable and represent a significant investment that most homeowners cannot afford to lose. An individual can sell, but that requires there being a buyer, so doesn’t actually solve the problem.

What is needed here is a government funded relocation program. The government buys houses in eligible areas at market rate (locked in at the time the program starts, as market rate should collapse to 0). Then, the government does nothing, and saves money from not needing to subsidize the insurance market, and need needing to spend as much on disaster response and relief. Given that the disaster relief savings is largely born by the federal government, this program should receive federal funding as well.

Just because you have been found guilty does not mean that you cannot subsequently have that finding overturned on appeal. Procedurally, there are a bunch of rules on how that happens; and death row inmates are given more appelet rights than those with life sentences. By having their sentences commuted to life, those would inmates may lose some of their extra appelet writes.

Renters are not that captive of customers. Once it becomes a common amenity, renters will start considering it as part of the rent when deciding where to live. Just like they do with utilities, garbage collection, and other amenities that landlords can charge for outside of base rent.

Most of the Golan Heights was occupied in 1967, and annexed in 1981 (in a move that most of the world still does not recognize as legitimate).

As far as I can tell, the settlements being discussed are still in that region, not the newly occupied region.

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.

Gaza’s Health Ministry casualty numbers have been stuck at around 40,000 for months. This is consistent, but not reliable. From the beginning, the GHM has only ever counted deaths directly attributable to the war who make it to a hospital (including those who are dead on arrival). Dead due to preventable caused like lack of food, water, sanitation, medicine or shelter? Not counted. Dead because a building blew up and your body is under a pile of rubble? Not counted unless someone dug up your body and took it to a hospital.

Even developed and functioning countries take a long time after “small” disasters to get an accurate count of the dead. The disaster in Gaza is still ongoing, and their capability to count the dead has been declining the entire time.

The GHM’s official numbers may be accurate for what they are. But what they are is a systemic undercount that is practically meaningless.