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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • NYT says this switch to pagers has been recent, after the Oct 7 attacks last year, when Hezbollah suspected that Israel was spying on the cell network, and using it to locate targets for strikes. So all these pagers got distributed to Hezbollah-affiliated people in short order . This system doesn’t use commercial networks, and has been called a “closed” network by the NYT.

    If all that is true, then that means anyone with one of these closed-network pagers got it from being involved with Hezbollah in the first place.













  • Think of someone who makes small crafts and sells them on some online platform. Someone who does this as a business will keep track of their materials costs, and subtract them from their sales cost, only paying taxes on their actual profit.

    But the IRS will only let you do this if they determine your intent is to make a profit. If they think you are purposely just selling enough to cover your materials, but using most of the materials for yourself, they can tell you that you never had an actual business in the first place, and that all that deducting of expenses never should have happened.


  • Because too many people treat politics like a sporting event. You root for your team no matter what, and against the other team. You have to do it this way, because if the other side wins that means your side loses.

    So there are too many people who view Trump as “Their Guy”, and are “rooting” for him. Anything they hear that might portray Trump in a negative light (like a criminal trial, for instance) must be the Other Side trying to cheat to win unfairly.

    I remind people that Roger Ailes was Nixon’s media consultant, and the lesson he learned from Watergate was that Nixon could have gotten away with it if the media was more sympathetic. He then went on to be the CEO of Fox News. That’s no accident. There is a direct line from Nixon to Trump, and Roger Ailes drew it.


  • Each sport has different jargon for their officials, and some sports use them differently than others. Some sports (like football) use them all at once. There are some distinctions that tend to run across multiple different sports, not perfectly, but good enough to discuss.

    Umpires tend to make binary decisions based strictly on the rulebook. Yes, sometimes there is some Grey area, like whether a batter “swung” or not. But the decisions are often yes/no.

    Judges tend to make more subjective decisions, comparing against some sort of ideal rather than a binary decision. In most sports where scores are not accumulated based on goals but assigned by officials based on how well they perform their routine, those officials are judges.

    Referees tend to make broader decisions that impact the overall game. They are also more likely to talk directly with coaches on either side, or the spectators.

    And there is no perfect analogy. American football does have a “referee” who is the main official, as well as an “umpire” who has set duties, and all the rest are technically judges but enforce things like scrimmage violations and penalties in the secondary. When an announcer says “That’s probably a holding flag” it is because it is thrown by a judge who typically has responsibility for looking for holding. Baseball only has umpires, the one with the most seniority is the “crew chief” and acts sort of like a referee but they don’t call them that.