Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, March 11, 2023
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60 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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A couple days back I woke up out of a dream recent enough where I basically remembered everything.
In my dream a cubic yard of cash money came into my possession. Unexplained dream logic, don’t ask why.
Most of the dream was trying to figure out how to launder the unexplained cash.
Upon waking it was fresh in mind. My brain kept poking at the money laundering problem. How could you get away with it?
I spent many years working directly for a major mortgage lender. We were required by law to undergo yearly training about OCC rules intending to thwart money laundering. I worked in IT – none of it applied to my job or to my department’s wider purview at all. Not even close! But every year the same fucking video. Compliance requirement. No big deal – an hour a year.
An hour after waking up my brain was still loy-key working the problem. My brain was clearly liking the challenge and was working through possible solutions. Kept at it. At times it required frontal lobe decision making to step forward.
For a big portion of this week I have thought about how to launder a cubic yard of hundred dollar bills I somehow possess because of a dream.
I appreciated the thought exercise. And my brain is damn clever. Not like Breaking Bad and Saul Goodman pitching a laser tag franchise.
Walt only bought the car wash just to humiliate his old boss who’d humiliated him in his narcissistic head.
A car wash or a laser tag franchise can only wash so much. Maybe 100k per year. if you are the highest grossing, most profitable car wash in the nation you will get tax and regulatory attention. Or with a laser tag franchise.
A very knotty problem. How?
Interesting new poll from USA Today asked what people think of “wokeness.”
Turns out 56% of all Americans think it means just being respectful of other people and are in favor of it. Including 51% of independents and a third of Republicans. (To be precise, they understand it to mean “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.”)
Same poll has opposition to current GOP book bans at 71-26.
Which means that the DeSantis campaign may not be quite the general election juggernaut some have been fearing.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/08/gop-war-woke-most-americans-see-term-positive-ipsos-poll/11417394002/
@de stijl:
I’m not sure whether washing is preferable to dry cleaning. On the one hand, water can mess up paper money. On the other, dry cleaning solvents might remove the ink off the paper. I’m not sure how high water or dryer temps can affect the modern plastic notes in such countries that have them.
@wr:
When you’re a political party that didn’t bother to write a platform during the last prez election, has leadership in one legislative house, whose plan is to do absolutely nothing and the party members in the other house can’t agree on whether the sun rises, you go with what you have.
I’ve been ready to go since 6:30. Still waiting for my wife to get it together. When I die, my gravestone is going to say, “This time I’m not waiting.”
@OzarkHillbilly:
Have a great time.
@de stijl: I read years ago that W. C. Fields, when he was a touring vaudeville act, would take his pay and immediately deposit it in a local bank. Supposedly when he died he left small amounts unclaimed all over the place. I believe banks are required to report cash transactions over $10,000. Do a George Santos. Put $9,999 deposits all over the place. You might need to travel, but you can afford a vacation. You have laptops and spreadsheets to track it, which Fields didn’t. Or does the dream include some fear the serial numbers are recorded somewhere?
This is in the context of SVB and seeing somebody say that large depositors don’t need to forego FDIC insurance. Apparently there’s a financial services company that will take your gazillion dollars and divvy it up into multiple insured $250,000 accounts. Diversification. What a concept. Perhaps SVB should have tried it.
@OzarkHillbilly: I’m amazed at how much time can pass between, “I’m ready to go.” and actually being at the door.
The post on Rod Dreher got me thinking about Pat Buchanan and an odd hall pass given to him and a couple of other politicians (Ron and Rand Paul): despite very well documented racist beliefs of the most base and vile sort, and ongoing associations with various rascists and fascists, they are virtually never challenged by the media and in fact are treated as serious people.
What is it about these three that gives them this seemingly total immunity?
@gVOR08: FWIW, banks are required to report deposits of over $10K and also any suspicious transaction. A deposit of $9999 is most likely going to be viewed as a suspicious transaction.
@wr:
I texted that same poll to my daughter – our communication is largely via text because we are modern and all – and suggested maybe it’s time for the counter-attack.
@MarkedMan:
First there was Buchanan, then there was Palin, and then there was Trump.
You may find this interesting:
http://www.nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/pat-buchanan-a-vindicated-extremist-packs-it-in.html
@gVOR08:.. at the door.
“at the door” and “out the door” are two different locations in the universe and can be separated by eons of time.
So apparently the real scandal at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital is that Jamie Reed was digging through the medical files of random patients she had no reason to be accessing, making a spreadsheets of people she thought weren’t really trans (despite not being a doctor, much less their doctor), and then sharing their PHI with right-wing politicians and “reporters”:
I guess the only good news is that this means that the NYT’s biased coverage is going to suddenly and mysteriously end.
According to Mark Epstein, Jeffrey’s brother, Jeffrey dumped Trump when he found out that Trump was a crook.
http://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epstein-dropped-donald-trump-realizing-crook-brother-says-2023-3
@Mister Bluster:
Actually they’re separated by a spatio-temporal anomaly that takes a long time to traverse.
@Kathy…spatio-temporal anomaly that takes a long time to traverse.
Equivalent to how long it’s going to take me to master the keyboard on my new iPhone.
I’ll be in London and Edinburgh over the next few weeks. I know London really well, having lived there twice. But Edinburgh…? I’ve only visited twice for short periods. Does anyone have any cool things to do in Ediburgh that doesn’t involve a castle or whiskey? I have those covered.
Restaurants?
Pubs?
Theatre?
Live music?
I’ll take any suggestions.
@EddieInCA:
Do visit The Scottish National Gallery.
As for pubs, try Leslie’s Bar on Ratcliffe Terrace.
Most of the restaurants I went to when I was living there have since closed, but try Henderson’s Salad Table for lunch if it still exists.
@Mister Bluster:
My hypothesis is that the Domestic Door Anomaly screws up the fabric of space-time, rendering the speed of light for material objects to 0.01 m/s (photons are unaffected).
Now reaching the speed of light, even diminished, is out of the question. At best a motivated human might manage half, or five millimeters per second. This does create relativistic effects, which explain why a person taking an unholy amount of time to traverse the anomaly doesn’t think it took them that long.
There’s also the Workplace Spacewarp Anomaly. It’s different. Essentially it diverts time from useful work to make-work tasks or to various distractions, including doing someone else’s work.
I ran into one yesterday. The boss gave me the price criteria for a project at 11 am. By 11:10 am I had the prices calculated from the master list, ready to sort and type into the proposal. Then the spacewarp struck, and I couldn’t finish the proposal until 1:30 pm. after the anomaly had dissipated.
When a manager asked what took so long, I quoted Sheldon Cooper: Your quarrel, sir, is with the laws of physics.
@de stijl: First of all, I wouldn’t want hundreds. After that, you don’t launder it at all. You simply put it in a drawer and spend it over your lifetime. A cubic yard of money would last me, and as best as I can tell, I’ll never need any after I die, so the rest is surplus anyway.
(For the record, no children and I’m the lowest net worth in my family.)
@MarkedMan: I thought it was $5k now, but I don’t know anymore. I remember reading that Kent Hovind (of dinosaurs and men roamed the earth together fame) tried embezzling the funds from his “ministry” 5k at a time an got caught because they were all reported.
In Lauren Boebert’s “announcement” yesterday, she noted
I saw the headline and remembered that when I was in grad school, I substitute taught in Roslyn, Washington for a time and one day, a middle school student asked me how old I was. When I told him I was 39, he exclaimed “Wow! You’re even older than my grandfather!”
Do the math. A middle school student is 13 or so which means that his grandfather was twenty-mumble when he was born. Or it might well be that the kid is innumerate. There was a fair amount of that in Roslyn as I recall. Either way, as I noted yesterday, welcome to my world.
@gVOR08:
Cash deposits in the $9000 range get flagged, noted. Repeapeted once a day $9k cash deposits get law attention fast. That’s not the solution. You will get busted eventually. That type of behavior even has a shorthand name in the biz – structuring or stacking, something like that. “Structured deposits” I believe, iirc.
Deposits above 10k are required to be reported, but there is rule against sharing data with the feds about all deposit and withdrawal activity and I guarantee you they do.
There was a scam in the late 90s where cartels would identify easily coerced drug addled/alcoholic losers to buy a house with their cash and sell it a month later. That loophole has since been plugged. Last time I bought a house I had to provide proof that I legitimately had the cash. I used my phone to take pictures of financial statements.
Real estate agents do not get enough love, btw. They are a one stop shop. Need a recommendation for a contractor, gardener, glazier, plumber, basement guy, kitchen guy, whatever, and b-bam they have a recommendation on hand. And generally good recommendations, too! They want repeat business and do not want to steer you to fly-by-night scummy operators. If you are working with a good realtor, chances very high they will steer you right, yeah they are getting a kickback, but from reputable folks that show up on time and do the required job with minimal hassle and do not ghost you halfway through. Everyone has a reputation to maintain.
Realtors need more love. They do good work usually.
(Realtor is a trademarked word. I don’t know all the law, but not all real estate agents are Realtors, but all Realtors are real estate agents. It’s accredation or something, not clear on the rules.)
I get a Christmas card every year from my last real estate agent. She obviously outsourced that process, but it’s a smart marketing move.
@Stormy Dragon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Attack_Helicopter
Learn something new every day.
@charon:
The meme was the basis for a story:
@Just nutha ignint cracker: an IRS form 8300 is required to be filled out for cash or cash-like transactions for 10k or more. A financial institution can also file them for lesser amount of they feel the transaction is odd or if the company has a lesser amount policy. It is not prepared in front of the customer and they do not sign it. Used to prep them up quite a bit as an f&i manager at a car dealership.
@CSK: Thanks for that. A few years ago he had an editorial somewhere that used thinly veiled cattle breeding language to all but openly vent his racist spleen. Not a peep from the media at large.
I’ve told this here in the past but I had a unique window onto Buchanan years ago when I was tuning through the shortwave bands by kerosene lamp during my late eighties stint in the Peace Corps, searching for English language broadcasts. Occasional I would come across one from some crazed religious nut in the Deep South or in one of the square states who had raised enough funds to erect a giant antenna somewhere and cobble together a studio. As I roamed the dial I came across Buchanan’s voice and stopped. It quickly became apparent he was a guest on one of these Jesus/libertarian/racist programs, and while he never used overtly racist language himself he was quite happy to engage in a dialog of mutual admiration with someone who referred to blacks as mud people and miscegenation as a crime against god, and went into tangents about how mixing in the blood of the inferiors would inevitably destroy America.
Steve Bannon says Elon Musk is owned by the Chinese Communist Party.
@Stormy Dragon:
So… she’s a whistleblower?
Step back from whether we believe her goals are good or evil (they’re evil, but let’s set that aside), and you have someone who sees something that they think is wrong happening at work, gathering information about it, and turning it over to the government and media that she trusts to investigate it.
If she was recording chemical leaks, she would be praised. She would be called heroic.
If she was recording a shocking number of removals of kidneys — even lacking the expertise to know whether it was unwarranted — she would be called brave.
This isn’t the big story that deflates the entire narrative that you want it to be. It’s a story about her methods, which are “sloppy whistleblower”.
She’s also a hate filled bitch, but it’s harder to quantify that.
@de stijl: Out of ignorance, what happens if you just say, “Went to the garage this morning and there was a pallet of cash”? Can you just decline to let anyone take it, declare it as income and pay the taxes?
@charon: There’s a really imaginative story I read some years ago that involved a character that was human but that identified as a space going battleship. In the end it made perfect sense that they did so and I had a lot of admiration for the sheer talent of the writer in pulling it off
@CSK:
We can run with that 😉
@Gustopher: Judging from what I read on…
say, for example, posts about Rod Dreher, there seems to be enough hate-filled bitchiness to go around. Jus’ sayin’.
@MarkedMan:
I’ve always had the sense that deep down, despite his laudatory references to the Judeo-Christian tradition, he really doesn’t like anyone who’s not Roman Catholic.
@Gustopher:
There is a reason why we, as a society, protect the privacy of patients, but there’s no equivalent “protected chemical spill information” category
@Michael Cain:
That’s the rub. How do you legitimize the cash and stick it into a bank account without suspicion where you can do irl things with that money. Buy and staff a yacht. Whatever.
The goal is to legitimize the cash and flow it into a bank account efficiently and quickly.
That is a deliciously hard problem.
I would never buy a boat. Boats are endless money sinks. The smallest kink in the armor means immediate disaster.
If I were stupid rich I would buy a tourist rocket ride to orbital space. ISS or bust, baby! My job would be to help out the person looking after the plant experiments.
If you inherited / came across a cubic yard of average packed bundles of hundred dollar bills, how much money is that?
So I just finished “Stolen Youth” on Hulu, documentary about a cult preying on students at Sarah Lawrence. 3 segments, 1 hour each.
Well worth while, if you are going to watch any such documentary, this is superior.
It seems Florida is becoming a pretty sucky place to live, especially if you own property.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/03/11/florida-insurance-claims-hurricane-ian/
@CSK: Well, given that in Catholic theology and tradition, I’m a heretic who is doomed to hell, I wouldn’t be surprised about that being true.
@de stijl: Given that your basic Haliburton briefcase will comfortably hold a million in 100s (1o stacks of 10 bundles each), I’m guessing something on the order of 10 billion or so. Probably more.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: The repatriated “pallet load of cash” for Iran that Republiqans and other RWNJ types where whining about at the time of the nuclear treaty was roughly a cubic yard. How much was in that?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I think it is true; Buchanan isn’t really happy nor comfortable around anyone who isn’t RC. I’ve gotten the same vibe from a few like him.
@Just nutha ignint crackeree:
You know who else needs public acknowledgment and applause is the workers in your county’s Coroner’s Office.
When my mom died I was both heir and executor. I had to shut down or redirect all her accounts. Many / most required a certified death certificate.
Sincere shout out to the folks in the Maricopa County Coroner’s Office. They did a major portion of the heavy lifting. And the funeral director. Seriously, no fooling, those people were God sent angels that made my life and that process substantially easier.
If / when that happens to you here are the accounts that need to paying attention to:
Electricity
Water
Gas
Internet
Cable TV
HOA dues
Lawn service
City/state/US taxes
Other
It is daunting, hard work getting everything shut down properly. And most everyone requires proper documentation.
Some companies / organizations have dedicated departments tasked to helping you, but that was fairly rare. It makes sense – customers die every day. Mostly, it was a big fucking hassle. Comcast was the worst by far. Pointless bullshit.
Again, shout out to Maricopa County. Those folks saved my sorry butt a lot of work.
One thing I never considered was just shutting down her main bank account. Next month service providers would attempt to hit her account for the monthly amount owed and would hit a void. An account that no longer existed.
A friend floated that possibility months later and damn, that makes so much sense. I possibly wasted two months of my life butting heads with incalcitrant bureaucracy for no purpose.
Just close the account. Let them figure it out. Just ignore all of them. That was the much more elegant solution my brain just totally missed. Their problem, not mine. I was so locked into one path so hard I missed the other.
Been there, done that. About 3o or so days after I returned from Korea, so roughly 7 years ago (closing the estate took most of a year). But my mom lived in a retirement home, so my experience was different from yours. In my case, the county department of vital records was the main agency. I never had any contact with the ME’s office at all because the funeral home issues the death certificate in my state. (At least, that is what I recall.) But yeah. Whoever does it is amazing.
@de stijl: Also the law firm that did my parents’ estate was instrumental in organizing things. The account got frozen on the day after she died, and I actually needed a power of attorney to get access to the records because my brother had been the co-respondent (?) for the account but was not the estate representative.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I was at a department meeting and a guy showed up to say something. He had a Halliburton aluminum briefcase. It wasn’t subtle-he was hard-core sporting it as he walked in. That backfired, for me at least.
I immediately judged him as a corporate asshole. We were in the mid stage of a major project. His message was to buckle down and work hard.
I was right in my snap judgment. A know-nothing ignorant snooty asshole who provided zero value. Not all snap judgements are correct, but mine was. In that case, mine was 100% correct. I actually overestimated him. Dude was a useless chud that added unnecessary daily overhead. He made things objectively worse for everyone. That fucking briefcase, man. What’s in there? A sandwich? Your lunch?
I like it when people tell you who they are with visual cues. It saves a lot of time and energy.
I dismissed him immediately. And I was right to do so.
@Stormy Dragon: No one cares about HIPAA in a whistleblower case.
If it was a story about patient neglect in a long term care facility, the number of HIPAA violations in the gathering of the evidence by the whistleblower wouldn’t be an issue — and that information would be needed. The long term care facility would be complaining about it as an obfuscation technique, but that’s it.
How the information in this gender care clinic thing came to light isn’t going to be an issue that sinks the story. The fact that the information is shit might, if we are lucky.
“Crazy lunatic woman shouldn’t have released private medical information” also just sounds like there is something to hide.
“Crazy lunatic woman is a crazy lunatic, who released misinformed speculation about patients” is better. But, ironically harder to prove because of HIPAA.
@de stijl: I expect that crypto is going to factor into it. You want to create the appearance of wealth from nothing, and then swap that appearance of wealth with actual wealth.
Find someone with a crypto wallet that has gained $X over the past N years, founded back at a point when you could have plausibly paid whatever the starting sum was, and then pay that person the value of the wallet plus a bit. You can buy a history of surprisingly fortunate trades which will hold up to close scrutiny.
But, at some point you have to physically hand someone cash, and moving that cash around is going to be bulky.
Or real estate, but that requires a larger upfront legitimate investment. Buy property below value officially, handing over some extra cash to make up the different, hold it for a while and sell.
It is probably easier to find unscrupulous folks to help in crypto rather than the relatively well regulated real estate industry though.
@MarkedMan: you may be thinking of Ann Leckie’s “Ancillary” series where humans are turned into meat-robots for use by the AIs that run the warships. One of the ships knows she will be destroyed and downloads her memories into a meat robot. The rest of the series is the story of what happens to that AI in meat robot form
Oh dear.
England vs France: 10 – 53 “Historic humiliation”
Worst ever home defeat. Third worst defeat EVER.
An absolute tonking.
France ripped us apart.
Dammit.
@de stijl:
Is that a good solution? Just closing the main checking account? Letting all of the service providers set to autopay try and fail to debit a bank account that longer exists?
Why is that potentially bad? That seems to be the smart solution that requires zero input or effort. The account you are trying to ping no longer exists so you cancel service. Which is what I wanted.
Doesn’t that do everything I wanted to happen? Am I missing something? Just close the checking account and ignore most everything.
Is it that simple?
If so, man, I wasted a ton of effort, talk, and angst.
@de stijl:
I tell my clients that if you hate your family buy a bunch of cars. Then have half of them titled correctly and the rest in close misspellings of your name and weird corporate entities. Make sure you shred corporate paperwork for max effect. Finally, make sure you leave just enough money to pay 2/3rds of the atty fee.
Here in IL that would take months to years of deeply frustrating clean up work.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
A bundle of 1000 100’s is about 6 inches by 6 inches by 2 inches. Not exactly but close. That’s 100k. 24 of those makes a cubic foot. $2.4m. So maybe $63M or so for the cubic yard? Is my math right here?
GOP and transgender
Masha Gessen interview
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-trans-rights
…
And more …
@Beth:
I didn’t even like my mom that much.
Had been out of touch for years. I am not a pro so I cannot diagnose, but I believe strongly she was severely bipolar and know for certain she was untreated when I was under her direct care.
Makes for a bad caretaker / parenting role.
Hey, I learned to look after myself and cook for myself at a very young age which are good life skills. I just learned too young out of necessity.
For the last few years she and I had a careful, cautious, gradual reconsideration about roles and communications. A cautious, baby step raproachment.
Good for her. She straightened up. Got a job. Did fairly well for herself. I was happy for her.
She kept her inner demons at bay and only shared her ugliness with me / at me in weird crazy phone calls. I’m impressed she was able to keep a job and excel at it without cracking. That takes guts and some resiliance. Good on her.
Man, I could have saved two months of very annoying, frustrating bullshit just by closing her checking account. I was a fool.
@Pete S: Don’t ask me. But looking around, I came up with 3 sources that said that 1 million in hundreds would be 689 cubic inches, which is, roughly 4/10 of a cubic foot. So about 2 1/2 million to the cubic foot and 27 cubic feet to a cubic yard would make seem to make 67.5 million, making your guess of by half or so and mine off by a couple of orders of magnitude.
@Pete S: I should have gone back to your post because I was thinking that your guess was $34 million. My apologies! [egg on face emoji]
@Erik: That’s it. Thanks.