An Arizona woman is accused of poisoning her estranged husband's coffee with bleach for several months and has been charged with attempted first-degree murder. The two had filed for divorce but were still living together with their son when he began to notice a bad taste in his morning cup back in March. — Read the rest
I love the perfect salty and buttery, but always crispy and never soggy popcorn you can get at good movie theaters and theme parks. I finally figured it out.
I tried microwave popcorn. I tried making my own microwave popcorn in paper bags, and glass bowls, adding butter before, adding butter after. — Read the rest
People are always trying to make bananas be ice cream, and who can blame them. Ice cream really is that bitch. She’s sweet and rich, cold yet comforting, and one of the first things to go when the diet starts. These approximations aren’t bad—the frozen banana “soft serve” that nearly crashed Pinterest is admittedly…
If the thought of negotiating the fees for a new car at a dealership makes you break out in hives, remember that research is your best friend. Before you shop, know which fees you have to pay, which ones you can negotiate, and which ones you can avoid altogether.
Under Covers is a delightful NSFW animation by Mighty Oak.
On the night of a lunar eclipse, we uncover the sweet, salacious, and spooky secrets of a small town. From a pigtailed psychopath to naughty nuns and everything in between, this stop motion animated film conjures a comforting thought: that weird is relative.
From the Vimeo blog:
The film, which originally debuted as part of Sundance Film Festival’s 2018 Midnight Shorts Program, provides a God’s-eye-view into the bedrooms of seemingly sweet characters hiding a secret or two under their blankets. What may seem innocuous is not always as innocent as it appears, and Olsen shows us that through a powerful combination of stop-motion animation, detailed character design, and a sick sense of humor.
lnxguitThis is obviously bad for consumers.
    
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This story was originally published in The Atlantic and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
A massive storm is barreling across the eastern half of the United States. Right now, it's dropping ice and havoc over the southeast. Power outages in some areas of Georgia could last for weeks.
Soon, the same storm could drop more than a foot of snow over the Appalachian Mountains with smaller (but still large!) amounts all the way to the coast.
Storm models show that the storm might hit heaviest on the Outer Banks of North Carolina as the storm plows up the whole coast through Thursday and Friday.
If you live east of Ohio, basically, you want to keep your eyes on this storm. But how should you do it? It seems that there's more weather information available to an average citizen than military planners would have had during the Cold War.
Here are some ways to go beyond the weather headlines. (Recently, I created a guide to going deeper into weather news, from which I've drawn substantially here.)
First, if you want to go deep with your weather dashboard, head to Weatherspark.com. It lets you dive into all kinds of data in a clean interface.
Next, you'll want to follow the right people and institutions:
Meteorologist Jeff Masters is talking about the ice that's hitting Georgia as I write. "Today's ice storm is likely to be more damaging than the January 2000 ice storm, which caused $48 million in losses in north Georgia," he says. "However, it will not compare to the damage from the most expensive ice storm in US history, the great February 1994 Southeast US ice storm. That storm killed nine people and caused $4.7 billion (2013 dollars) of damage."
So is Eric Holthaus, who has some sad possibilites in his post on the storm, including that Atlanta could lose one-quarter of its trees.
The Capital Weather Gang is liveblogging the storm. If you live in the mid-Atlantic, they'll be indispensable. For example, here they show you the predictions for the storm's start time (in military format, e.g. 20 is 8pm).
If you're a New Yorker—but anywhere really—make sure you're following the National Weather Service Twitter account for your area.
If you're not satisfied with the filtered information that you're getting from these institutions and your local meteorologists, you can get your hands on the data yourself by going to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
There you can get satellite imagery, like this loop in the infrared part of the spectrum for the past 24 hours. Note the red in the southeast.
You can also find national radar maps.
Or zoom in on a specific region, like, say, Atlanta.
Finally, if you really want to go deep, you can look at the various model predictions. Here, you can watch the precipitation totals bloom over the next two days in the standard NOAA Global Forecasting System.
But you can also compare between the models, if you're a nerd who is so inclined. So, here you could run the same 48 precipitation prediction with the North American Mesoscale Model. Or you can look at the Global Ensemble Forecast Model, which brings together 20 different ways of predicting the weather.
If you're really interested in this stuff, the Weather Underground has a nice (relatively) simple tool that lets you compare the different forecasts. Here, for example, is the model output for the GFS and NAM models looking at whether it will be snowing, raining, or otherwise precipitating at 7 a.m. on Thursday.
One can see how comparing these two charts might be useful if you live on the south side of Philadelphia. The GFS shows the area solidly in snow (blue) while the other model has freezing rain (red) encroaching on the region. Of course, they also show how difficult weather prediction is, and why there are always uncertainties about the particulars of any given weather event.
If one of your goals is to learn to play music (or improve your playing), then this advice from musician Dick Hensold on how to practice strategically—with a limited amount of practice time—is for you. The key is what he calls "proper cultivation" of your technique.
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Corporations are quick to claim “corporate personhood” and their First Amendment rights when it comes to their ability to donate to political candidates, influence elections, and lobby or when it comes to advertising their products, especially those deemed dangerous or socially destructive. But on tax day, corporations are quite content with a tax code full of perks and privileges for corporations that are not available to living, breathing human beings.
If you forget to feed the meter, or go a little too fast and get a speed camera traffic ticket in the mail, or God forbid fail to pick up after your dog in a public park, when it comes to tax time, forget it – none of these fines for bad behavior are tax deductible.
But that’s not the case for corporate bad actors. Take, for example, BP’s toxic mess in the Gulf of Mexico or Wells Fargo’s abusive lending practices that cost tens of thousands American families their homes. BP’s clean-up costs and Wells Fargo’s settlement fees were likely fully deductible, leaving the rest of us to pick up a significant piece of the tab for their destructive behavior. Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Charles Grassley (R-IA) have issued a bi-partisan call to end the tax deduction for Wall Street banks settling charges of lending abuse that lead to the Great Recession.
When corporations fall on hard times and lose money in a given year, those losses cannot only be used to fully offset any taxes they owe that year, but they are allowed to carry those losses into the future for up to seven years, reducing their taxes when good times return.
Families face a different set of rules on tax day. Imagine the family that has experienced long-term unemployment or costs of an uninsured major illness during the year. They might have to deplete their savings or retirement accounts to stay afloat. Like the corporation, they are able to deduct the cost of their losses in the year they occur, but unlike corporations they cannot generally carry the deductions they cannot use into future years.
Corporations can use future tax savings to recoup their losses and replenish the savings drained during the bad year. Human families get no such benefit.
For American workers, there is little doubt where their income is earned and thus where the taxes are owed. If you are a doctor with an office in Omaha, you can’t pack up your diploma and ship it to a bank vault in the Cayman Islands and tell your patients to mail their payment check to a post office box in the Caribbean nation, explaining that they need to pay for the intellectual property represented by that diploma.
But if you are a corporation, that’s exactly what you can do. U.S corporations have $1.7 trillion of their profits stashed offshore, much of it in places like the Cayman Islands, even though most have no employees or offices in tax haven nations. They do so because they register their patents in a tax haven nation, like the Cayman Islands, that imposes no taxes on corporate income. They argue that the shift in profits from the U.S. to the tax haven is to pay the cost of the intellectual property represented by the patent. This sort of profit shifting and tax haven abuse by corporations costs the U.S Treasury $90 billion a year in lost tax revenue.
Millions of American families suffered damage to their homes and property last year, from Superstorm Sandy, western fires and other natural disasters. The federal tax code expects human property owners to pick up the full cost of damage for an amount equal to ten percent of the taxpayer’s annual reported income. Beyond the ten percent threshold, any additional losses may be taken as a tax deduction.
In contrast, corporations face no such income threshold. Corporate shareholders are not asked to absorb damages equal to ten percent of the corporation’s taxable income as individual families are. Corporations can –and do – deduct every dollar of losses they incur. Many firms, including Verizon and other utilities serving the New York and New Jersey areas saved millions of dollars on their 2012 taxes by deducting the full costs of Sandy damage on their taxes.
About five million American citizens live or work abroad. Come April 15th, each of them is expected to file a tax return and pay U.S. taxes on all their income. The amount they owe is reduced by an amount equal to any taxes they paid to foreign governments on that income.
But U.S. corporations get a different deal, called deferral. They get to indefinitely put off paying U.S. taxes of their foreign until and unless they bring those funds back to America. This loophole costs the U.S. Treasury almost $60 billion a year. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) recently introduced the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, which would close this loophole, putting corporations and real humans on the same footing come tax time.
As many people work hard to make corporations less human on election day, perhaps it is time to make them more human on tax day.
Scott Klinger is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Wed, 04/10/2013 - 13:06
