Since you are ignorant of the law and incapable of finding it yourself, here is section 7214 ....read it and get back to me, I'll explain how it applies.



26 U.S. Code § 7214. Offenses by officers and employees of the United States

(a) Unlawful acts of revenue officers or agents
Any officer or employee of the United States acting in connection with any revenue law of the United States—
(1) who is guilty of any extortion or willful oppression under color of law; or
(2) who knowingly demands other or greater sums than are authorized by law, or receives any fee, compensation, or reward, except as by law prescribed, for the performance of any duty; or
(3) who with intent to defeat the application of any provision of this title fails to perform any of the duties of his office or employment; or
(4) who conspires or colludes with any other person to defraud the United States; or
(5) who knowingly makes opportunity for any person to defraud the United States; or
(6) who does or omits to do any act with intent to enable any other person to defraud the United States; or
(7) who makes or signs any fraudulent entry in any book, or makes or signs any fraudulent certificate, return, or statement; or
(8) who, having knowledge or information of the violation of any revenue law by any person, or of fraud committed by any person against the United States under any revenue law, fails to report, in writing, such knowledge or information to the Secretary; or
(9) who demands, or accepts, or attempts to collect, directly or indirectly as payment or gift, or otherwise, any sum of money or other thing of value for the compromise, adjustment, or settlement of any charge or complaint for any violation or alleged violation of law, except as expressly authorized by law so to do;
shall be dismissed from office or discharged from employment and, upon conviction thereof, shall be fined not more than $10,000, or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both. The court may in its discretion award out of the fine so imposed an amount, not in excess of one-half thereof, for the use of the informer, if any, who shall be ascertained by the judgment of the court. The court also shall render judgment against the said officer or employee for the amount of damages sustained in favor of the party injured, to be collected by execution.


Edit: I'll save time, here's the other law he's violating which unambiguously states he had no choice but to turn them over immediately.

26 U.S. Code § 6103. Confidentiality and disclosure of returns and return information
(11) Disclosure of information regarding status of investigation of violation of this section
(f) Disclosure to Committees of Congress
(1) Committee on Ways and Means, Committee on Finance, and Joint Committee on Taxation
Upon written request from the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives, the chairman of the Committee on Finance of the Senate, or the chairman of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Secretary shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request, except that any return or return information which can be associated with, or otherwise identify, directly or indirectly, a particular taxpayer shall be furnished to such committee only when sitting in closed executive session unless such taxpayer otherwise consents in writing to such disclosure.

Edit: allow me to save time again, by not following 6103 (11) (f) and furnishing the return requested in writing by the chairman of the Ways and Means committee, he undeniably violates 7214 (a) (3), which comes with a 5 year sentence. Understand now?

No way bot! That's like 30 human years, right? Do I get a prize/reward?

I'm upvoting for it through benefit of doubt, and despite my, I think are likely racist, fears about his training.

He neither looks mistreated nor terrified. I wish to see what sort of reward he got for it. Either a treat or even an ear scratch would make me feel better about it.

My experience differs.

If, in one's opinion, there are no good cops, how exactly does one stand up and support them? Those brave few cops that turn in crooked cops get insane support from the public, and death threats from other cops. What would you suggest? It's not a lack of public support for good cops that's an issue, it's a total lack of repercussions for the bad.
Edit: Also, there's the mindset that holding them to a high standard IS supporting the few good cops that meet those standards by not rewarding those who don't.

Yes, people who support good cops are in a tight spot. But they also need (the cops' ) support. They need someone to believe in. Ftfy.

I believed in good cops for quite a while, and couldn't find them, that why I stopped believing.

Not by intent, but as the model for America's youth of the best known and most successful person that constantly and clearly exemplifies every bad behavior mentioned to a ridiculous extreme, publicly and proudly, and worse is rewarded for it by his base, it is somewhat about him, intentionally or not.

Trump, our "leader", is following that outdated map and dragging the country along the path. It's hard to get people to change course when the leader keeps driving them farther down the wrong trail.

The belt isn't the answer, it is a tool. The same way physical punishments like Push-Ups are for Military discipline. The same way solitary confinement or hard labor is used as a tool to provide discipline in prison.

I do not subscribe to the notion that non-punitive punishment is effective. Offering Johnny a new game if he doesn't torment his sister is teaching him that being bad is rewarded.

In the case of this incident, the belt was used as a tool to indicate that he had broken the rules and it was reinforced later by grounding.

Conversely, she could have taken the other available option and simply called the police to report her car stolen, which it was. His being her son does not excuse him from a crime of taking a vehicle that does not belong to you. That method would not be considered child abuse according to the guidelines you propose, however it would lead to juvenile charges, exposure to the legal system, and a simmering hatred of his mother that I suggest a simple embarrassing spanking/grounding would not.

Can you take it too far with physical punishment? Absolutely, and then it is most definitely abuse. Beating a child with an improvised switch until the child bleeds is abuse. Spanking them with a belt a few times in public, which adds a humiliation factor to the punishment, is not.

To me, the video sorta oversells the difficulty in identifying / escaping from "ridiculous claims", at least in comparison to my personal experiences.

I grew up in a very religious (Christian, Methodist) family / city / state / country. I was questioning the indoctrination at an early age (younger than 10), and rejecting it due to never receiving satisfactory answers to those questions by ~12. Actually, one of the most significant pushes for me was the ultimate reward/punishment thing. Zero consistency and open contradictions between different religions / sects / sources, etc. In symbolic logic, contradictions mean that one of your premises is wrong. Reconsider what you "know" and try again.

With regards to atheism vs (a)gnosticism, technically I'm an agnostic because I don't know with absolute certainty that there is no god / gods out there. However, in practice, I easily and comfortably would rather self-identify as an atheist. Why, when I don't know for certain? Because I also don't know that there isn't an Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Loch Ness Monster, or Leprechauns, yet I don't feel compelled to tell people that I'm "agnostic" about those things. No. They are pretty clearly human-invented bullshit, with readily apparent human motivations behind their invention. Sounds like religion to me.

That's basically Russel's teapot.

I got interested in that question based on the Elder Scrolls series. Morrowind had a basically static world, Oblivion was basically entirely scaled to the player, and Skyrim is scaled to the player but within a min/max range.

To me, Morrowind was great because it could put appropriately powerful rewards in difficult (or just plain obscure) areas. Oblivion in particular was bad at making leveling feel like a treadmill because every time you leveled up as the player, pretty much every enemy would be that much more powerful also. Skyrim was better about that since an area would generally set its difficulty scale based on the first time you visited it, so you could leave and come back later if it was too tough, but it still felt a little off.

Another associated problem is how loot gets influenced by those leveled lists. In Skyrim, loot in containers and in the inventory of leveled enemies generally scales, but loot sitting out in the open in the game world generally doesn't. Which is really annoying, because all generic loot pretty much everywhere ends up being crappy low-level iron. God forbid there's some steel, elven, or dwarven gear in places where it would totally make sense to be (say, dwarven gear in dwarven ruins) that you might venture into before that gear becomes "level appropriate".


In a related issue, one beef that I have with general RPG mechanics is how they all feel the need to make you drastically more powerful at level 5 compared to level 1, and again at level 10 compared to level 5, and so on. By the time you're near the level cap, you're probably 100-1000 times as powerful as you were at level 1, which gives a good sense of accomplishment but just doesn't seem realistic, and leads to this problem with fixed difficulty or level scaling. Western RPGs (boiling back to pen and paper DnD rules) certainly aren't great about this, but JRPGs are completely ridiculous about it, which is pretty much why Final Fantasy 3(6) was the last one that I enjoyed. In my adulthood, I just can't handle them -- even going back and trying to play FF3 that I *loved* way back when.

I'd like to see more games where you get more skills, polish, and versatility as you progress, but overall you aren't more than 3-5 times as powerful at max level as you were at the beginning. Mount and Blade is one of the few games I can think of that comes close to that.

I'm very big on religious freedom, but the depths of emotional exploitation, deceit and manipulation of this entire program should be criminal. We recognize other kinds of con jobs and convict for it, this crew should be too.

Religious freedom should start getting cut off when you preach the necessity of giving the speaker your money in exchange for what they will do for you. Giving to a charity that will go on to help others is one thing, it's another to pay money to get someone to promise you their 'blessing', prayers, or even financial rewards that will metaphysically be manifest in return.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

On second thought - maybe don't reward self-linkers. Darn. It's funny though, and fairly original.

I remember hearing that the who came up with FedEx got a bad grade in his business school class because the idea wasn't considered possible; the cost of entry is all of those facilities worldwide plus all of the airplanes or in other words pretty damn high; and then you have to turn all of that on at the same time; so if you're first you pretty much have a monopoly and can set really high prices; so the rewards are extremely high, but so are the costs and risks

Certainly we can't all be eagles, but those who've resigned themselves to being weasels should recognize their station and act accordingly, not pretend they fearlessly soar the skies of death deserving rewards and accolades from the comfort their burrow.
I get where you're coming from, but I disagree it's one or the other. Checking out and half assing it because success didn't come fast enough only ensures it will never arrive. Working hard and smart striving for greatness is the best way to achieve it, but of course it's still no guarantee.
And yes, the "system" could certainly use improvements too, but an individual can have far more positive impact on their own lives by working to improve themselves than they can on the system working to improve it. It's best to work on both whenever possible.

I take all that to heart.

In my native language and for me any woman under my age is a girl AND any man or woman taking part in sports and games is a boy or girl. They would be greeted and befriended in a much less formal manner than, for example during an opera performance intermission in the theatre hallway or in a workplace setting. For me girls running around on skis with guns are girls, I dont think of them as world class athletes but as ordinary people doing something enjoyable and rewarding.

I have trouble being entirely serene in the face of political correctness, so do feel free to correct my errors if I am found wanting in this area, even if I sometimes may appear to not take things seriously. Just a disclaimer.

"Edit this video" is now hidden in a menu that appears when you hover over your name above your video (Eric told me). Thanks.

Another thing to keep in mind is that different forms of elements and chemicals have very different properties.

Pure elemental liquid mercury is pretty cool stuff. Lots of people (myself included) can remember playing with elemental mercury in their bare hands in chemistry classes, etc., and even that sort of cavalier use basically never resulted in cases of mercury poisoning.

In sheer statistical terms, I gather that it is relatively safe to have pure liquid mercury directly on your skin -- cupped in your hands, say -- for short to medium periods of time. Open wounds, even small ones, can make that significantly worse. Even ingesting elemental mercury generally doesn't result in too much absorption into the body, but it remains a terrible idea. Evaporation of elemental mercury even at room temperature can lead to inhalation of mercury vapor, which is drastically more dangerous. So, ventilation and environmental controls are quite important.

This organic mercury sounds like terribly nasty stuff, but fortunately people are very unlikely to be exposed to it outside of a lab or if you are a scientist who is intentionally synthesizing it.

I think it is kind of a shame that those high school chemistry type sessions of messing around with elemental mercury are pretty much gone today. On the other hand, even though the risks are lower with elemental mercury like that, the rewards aren't really all that high either. I have fun memories of messing around with the stuff, but it wasn't by any means necessary or important outside of pure academic curiosity. Better safe that sorry I guess, particularly when the extreme end of "sorry" results in horror stories like this.