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I spent the first two decades of my career as a social scientist studying liars and their lies. I thought I had developed a sense of what to expect from them. Then along came President Trump. His lies are both more frequent and more malicious than ordinary people’s.

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The college students in our research told an average of two lies a day, and the community members told one. (A more recent study of the lies 1,000 U. S. adults told in the previous 24 hours found that people told an average of 1.65 lies per day; the authors noted that 60 percent of the participants said they told no lies at all, while the top 5 percent of liars told nearly half of all the falsehoods in the study.) The most prolific liar among the students told an average of 6.6 lies a day. The biggest liar in the community sample told 4.3 lies in an average day.

In Trump’s first 298 days in office, however, he made 1,628 false or misleading claims or flip-flops, by The Post’s tally. That’s about six per day, far higher than the average rate in our studies. And of course, reporters have access to only a subset of Trump’s false statements — the ones he makes publicly — so unless he never stretches the truth in private, his actual rate of lying is almost certainly higher.

I study liars. I’ve never seen one like President Trump.

Senate Republicans Made a $289 Billion Mistake in the Handwritten Tax Bill They Passed at 2 a.m. Go Figure.

It appears that Senate Republicans managed to make a $289 billion or so mistake while furiously hand-scribbling edits onto the tax bill they passed in the wee hours of Saturday morning. The problem involves the corporate alternative minimum tax, which the GOP initially planned to repeal, but tossed back into their stew at the last second in order to raise some desperately needed revenue. The AMT is basically a parallel tax code meant to prevent companies from zeroing out their IRS bills. It doesn’t allow businesses to take as many tax breaks but, in theory, is also supposed to have a lower rate.

Except not under the Senate bill. When Mitch McConnell & co. revived the AMT, they absentmindedly left it at its current rate of 20 percent, the same as the new, lower rate of the corporate income tax that the bill included. As a result, many companies won’t be able to use tax breaks that were supposed to be preserved in the legislation, including the extremely popular credit for research and development costs. Corporate accountants started freaking out about this over the weekend, but the situation reached high farce when a group of lawyers from Davis Polk pointed out that, by leaving the AMT intact, Republicans had essentially undermined their bill’s most important changes to the international tax code.

As my username might suggest, I love winter. It's been pretty nice outside lately so I wanted to get out to the mountains for a walk with my daughter and wife. There is a nice little lake in the mountains about 50 minutes away. It's got a pretty wide, flat trail, so I thought it would be perfect for towing my girl in a cheap-o sled I bought from Canadian Tire for $12.

We invited a friend and we got all loaded into the car and headed out. As we get closer to the mountains, it became clear that my plan had a glaring flaw... there was no snow. My plan to tow my girl in the sled was not going to work out and we didn't bring a stroller. Oh, well, I guess I'll just have to carry her and we'll go for a short walk.

It was a beautiful day. About -2C, and the lake that we went to was barely frozen. Frozen enough that you needed a fist sized rock with a high trajectory to break though the ice. It was really fun to throw rocks at the ice. If you took a smaller rock and threw it like you were skipping a rock, it would skitter along the top of the ice and travel a LONG way. Several hundred yards. The ice was very smooth and fast.

When you would throw a rock along the surface, it would make an eerie metallic-like sound -- just like this: https://youtu.be/ZIHF5EoEixc?t=227

We finished up our short walk and went into a nearby town for a pizza lunch. I was a little scared that my daughter (who had not had a nap) would be a little shit at the restaurant, but she was an angel! So well behaved. I was pleasantly surprised.

Next week my wife goes back to work. She's only going back part-time (3 6-hour days/week), but I'm a little scared to be left alone with my daughter for the day. I've never had much luck with getting her to go to sleep. I'm going to have to figure something out. I've been able to get her to sleep in the past by reading to her and then cuddling until she goes to sleep, but that hasn't worked in several months. The car also seems to work, but she wakes up when I unload her. My wife uses her boob to get her to settle down.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a father on how to get a 1-year old to sleep?

The BBC has a story about the discovery of a diary left by an Auschwitz victim.

Marcel Nadjari was a Greek Jew interned at Auschwitz and forced by the Nazis to escort fellow Jews to the gas chambers, burn the bodies, collect gold fillings, women's hair and to dispose of their ashes in a nearby river.

Realising that their own murder was only a matter of time, the Jewish slaves of the Sonderkommando documented their experiences secretly. Nadjari put his manuscripts in a thermos flask in a leather pouch and buried it near Crematorium III.

The flask was discovered by a Polish forestry student 36 years after it was buried.

Nadjari survived Auschwitz, but his parents and sister were murdered in another camp.

Republicans say they have the votes! They're going to pass a massive tax reform bill Friday night that would permanently lower corporate tax rates and undo the Obamacare individual coverage mandate. And a bunch of other stuff. We're not exactly sure about everything it would do yet. Why? Because we haven't read the tax reform bill.

The Senate is about to vote on a tax bill it's still writing

Anna Soubry is a Conservative MP and opponent of Brexit. The Guardian has an interview with her when she talks about the abuse she's had from the mainstream British press, death threats and a lack of support from her own party.

What concerns her now is the deafening silence emanating from her own side on this matter. “The party has got to call this out. But yet again, I feel it will be weak. They will not take the sort of robust action they need to. My whip said, ‘Sorry to hear about this’, but there’ll be no further interest because at least one of them [those attacking her] is a Conservative himself: Tom Borwick [leading light of Vote Leave, the son of the former Conservative MP for Kensington Victoria Borwick, and one of those encouraging people on social media to tell their MPs face to face what they make of their so-called attempts to thwart Brexit]. He hasn’t issued death threats, but by calling us anti-democratic, he is stoking and fuelling the fire. There’s something about these hard Brexiters: it’s fascinating, actually. Look at the language some of them use. It’s not enough that you accept the result [of the referendum]; it’s not enough that you voted to trigger article 50. Now it’s, ‘Yeah, yeah, but do you believe?’ It’s like the counter-revolutionary forces of Chairman Mao or Joe Stalin. It’s not enough that you went against everything you ever believed in; you have to sign up in blood. It’s like Orwell’s thought police and the reign of terror combined.”

This is not democracy. This is not my UK.

Anna Soubry on Brexit: ‘History will condemn those who haven’t tried to stop all this nonsense’

Very eloquently put.

Meanwhile, some people experss their regret for voting to leave the EU.

Granted, it was a long weekend, but still... The euphoria of being up 100K, then the despair of watching it disappear over the span of a couple days. It's fucked up. I'm not rich. $100k is a fucking shit-ton of money to me.

This story starts in the spring of 2013. Bitcoin had just broken $250USD and was crashing (or 'correcting') downwards. A coworker that had built a mining rig a year earlier told me that they sold and made enough money to buy a car - she had made some real money. I decided to take a better look into bitcoin.

Over the next few days, I spent hours reading all about bitcoin and eventually got my computer mining bitcoin for me. Then I bought another video card. And another. It wasn't long before BTC mining wasn't profitable anymore, so I started mining LiteCoin. I had a dedicated computer in my basement (a motherboard with 2 video cards sitting on an old coffee table -- no case) that I ran for a year. I got 200 Litecoin from that.

In November 2013, shit started getting real. LTC had been holding steady at $4/LTC making my stash worth about $800. That month, LTC shot up to a peak of ~$50/LTC. All of a sudden, these Litecoins were worth $10k! I sold 1/2 @ $45. It was amazing timing, because the next day the bubble burst. I managed to walk away with about $5,000.

That $5k is what I used to later buy Bitcoin in the spring of 2014. This was just after Mt Gox had imploded and the price of bitcoin was... erratic. Everyone thought that the Goxxing would be a minor blip, and that bitcoin would recover quickly. Well, it wasn't. I spent the next 2 years watching bitcoin go lower and lower and lower.

In January of 2015, some guy decided to sell 30,000 bitcoin. That's an insane amount, and I think is the biggest on-exchange dump ever. He earned the nickname 'manbearwhale'. 1/2 man, 1/2 bear (in trader lingo - a seller), 1/2 whale (a big player). It was a depressing time. Bitcoin had been losing ground for years. My $5,000 was significantly less at that time and I had spent the previous 2 years watching it dwindle away.

That event started a reversal. Bitcoin had hit rock bottom, so there was nowhere to go but up. It's been going up ever since.

***

Last week was an interesting week in Bitcoinland. The blocksize increase that we have been waiting for years to implement was called off days before it was scheduled to take effect. Bitcoin now doesn't have any -real- scaling plans. If Bitcoin can't grow, then it's useless. I feel that bitcoin (or something like it) is literally going to change the world. It's as important as the transistor or the Internet. If bitcoin can't grow to accommodate more than a few million users, then it's effectively dead.

Disheartened with the path that bitcoin was headed, I decided to convert a big chunk of my bitcoin into Bitcoin Cash. Well... Bitcoin cash had a wild weekend. It rocketed from $600 all the way to $2,700 - a 4.5x increase in a couple days. I had a good entry point, and had been buying a bit more as it went up. Before I knew it, I was up over $100k! It was euphoric. I had predicted a rise like this (not the magnitude of the rise, but that there would be a significant rise). I was telling my wife, and dreaming of expensive cars and exotic vacations.

Then it started crashing. Down. Down. Down. A relentless grind downwards. Do I sell? Hold? I would just watch the red candles slip more and more. My euphoria was turning into despair; Worry. I couldn't watch the chart continue to fall, but I also couldn't look away. Down some more. Finally it found some support, then dropped again...

In the end, I pretty much broke even, but it was a wild ride. I have never made and lost so much money in a matter of days, and likely never will again.

There’s now a lot more nerds in elected office. Seventeen candidates with STEM-backgrounds ran their respective races Tuesday, from Virginia governor-elect Ralph Northam—a doctor—to Tiffany Hodgson, a neuroscientist who won a seat on the Wissahickon School Board in eastern Pennsylvania.

Many candidates decided to run only after President Donald Trump ushered in one of the most anti-science administrations in history. And a number of the campaigns sprung out of meetings with 314 Action, a political advocacy group that is helping scientists run for office.

“Voters are ready for candidates who are going to use their STEM training to base policy on evidence rather than intuition,” Shaughnessy Naughton, the founder of 314 Action, said in a press release. “Science will not be silenced.”

17 STEM Politicians Won Elections Tuesday

Lot of Trump news this morning! Presumably the Mueller indictments will get their own story so don't miss this additional development in the noise:

George Papadopoulos, a former campaign adviser to President Trump, pleaded guilty earlier this month to lying to federal officials about his contacts with Russian nationals he believed had ties to the Russian government during Trump’s presidential campaign.

Papadopoulos, who was named by Trump in March 2016 as a foreign policy adviser to the campaign, pleaded guilty to lying about his contacts with the Russians when he was interviewed in January by federal agents who were investigating Russian interference in the presidential campaign.

Trump campaign adviser pleaded guilty to lying about Russian contacts

Remember how he wasn't going to be beholden to Wall Street's interests?

Treasury Department sides with Wall Street, against federal consumer watchdog agency on arbitration rule