But I also get why the IRS doesn’t want to walk up to Congress right now, hat in hand, and say “We spent more money prosecuting them than we gained” or anything close to that, and give the GOP ammo for defunding them again.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60037

Actual outlays for enforcement. Outlays for enforcement activities in 2023 were less than projected. Most of the expenditures from the enforcement account stem from labor costs, and through 2023, the IRS hired fewer revenue agents (the enforcement staff who handle complex audits) than it had planned. That shortfall suggests that the IRS has encountered greater difficulty in hiring auditors than it anticipated. CBO expects that the IRS will be able to use all the mandatory funding that it designated for hiring in later years, but because of the delays in hiring and training new auditors, revenue collections from enforcement activities are smaller in CBO’s February 2024 projections than they were in its previous projections.

“From The Article”

I hate that this takes up space in my brain

Besides the fact that present-day battery technology makes this impossible, modern smartphones display a very obvious indicator when apps are using the microphone.

Hotword detection notwithstanding, as that happens at the hardware level.

You aren’t being downvoted “simply for bringing up points that might happen to not fit the hive mind mentality.” You’re being downvoted for making up a contrived excuse that was easily disproven by the fucking thumbnail, let alone the article, for your own titillation.

Monsters. Elmo identifies as a Monster, not a Muppet.

#🤌

Verbosity and hair-trigger outrage

What condescending claptrap. Get off OPs back, dingus.

The two are not mutually exclusive. The downvote button is not an “I don’t like this” button.

They were keeping their promise of 10 years of Lightning ecosystem support. Dropping the old iPod connector was highly controversial.

If any KDE developers read this, we seriously and strongly recommend that the KDE team takes a long, close look at Deepin. DDE shows both how pretty and how functional a Windows-style desktop can be, without needing Plasma’s multiple overlapping options. This is what we’d hoped to see in Plasma 6, but didn’t get. It’s probably fair to say that Deepin is the most sophisticated implementation of a Windows-like interface on any OS these days. It’s considerably more flexible and configurable than Windows 11 itself, and it makes Cinnamon, MATE, Budgie, and the others look clunky and old-fashioned. Don’t get us wrong; this grumpy old vulture is happier with the relatively austere and Spartan Xfce, but for those who want something that’s shinier out of the box, DDE shows how it ought to be done. Even Microsoft could learn from the Chinese developers.

It may or may not have one, at least until we observe the results

It makes about as much sense as the typical ones anyway. Or, like, the output to nmap --help or something.

That’s the joke.

I hope.

Case in point.

Thanks for the alternative explanation. Completing the square never made much sense to me either, so I never would have arrived there.

Hurr durr what if I just multiply the whole thing by 4a for some reason? Oh and then after that I’ll add b² to both sides, just for shits and giggles. And for good measure, I’ll move a few numbers from one side to the other, and that leaves me with 4a²x² + 4abx + b² = b² - 4ac.

And then golly gee! Wouldn’t you know it? That just happens to let the left side factor neatly into (2ax + b)²! So I’ll just take the square root of both sides…

No!

No!

Bad!

This is fucking voodoo. I hate this shit. It’s like trigonometric substitution.

Math is procedural. Math is algorithmic. Math is repeatable.

“If these numbers looked a little different than they do, I could solve this. Oh, wow! If I just sprinkle these magic values into my problem, everything works out great!”

Oh yes, I can see how if you just plug in this shit you pulled out of your ass, everything works out great! But when you aren’t around for a fecal transfer, I have no idea how to come up with that.

I was top of my class in math. But that voodoo shit never made any sense to me.

And there is absolute value of zero chance I could figure all that out in the heat of the moment if I forgot the quadratic formula. I had to work backwards from the formula to even get all that in the first place.

The pause feature doesn’t actually stop the app from running. It just pauses notifications.

You’re looking for something more like Greenify.

I’ve been hearing the Donkey Kong song in my head for the last 6 hours. If you know how to make it stop, I’m all ears.

Except in glacier, because English is fucked.