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Forcible kisser Al Franken says he'll resign from our beautiful Senate! Just like inappropriate toucher John Conyers resigned from the House! Like I told them to. They're resigning, so we won't have to IMPEACH them. #MeToo

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.

I'm not going to buy any more cryptocurrencies until I get my next paycheck, which will be towards the end of the month.

There are some who regard BitCoin's quickly-rising exchange rate to be an investment bubble, much as the dot-com boom was followed by the dot-com crash, as well as the real estate bubble that crashed in late 2007.

I agree for the short term but disagree for the long term.

That it is a bubble is evidenced by all the BitCoin Get Rich Quick advertisements that I see on Facebook. Doubtlessly they're appearing all over the Internet.

Most disturbing to me is an ad that describes BitCoin's rise as a "paradigm shift". If someone ever says the words "paradigm shift" to you, turn around and run as fast as you can. The dot-com boom was claimed to be the conceptually similar "new economy".

Cryptocurrencies sometimes crash when someone burglarizes an exchange by hacking its website. Just once so far - that we know of - the alleged burglary is an inside job. Mt Gox blamed its burglary on a flaw in the BitCoin BlockChain protocol. A forensic accounting investigation by the Japanese authorities led to the arrests of some of Mt Gox' top executives.

These crashes have all recovered quickly.

The current bubble is the result of naive investors buying lots of BitCoin. The most likely cause of a crash will be sales that are made by sophisticated investors and investment banks that want to realize their gains. There will come a point where even a small drop in price will lead the naive investors to sell as fast as they can so they can realize their gains before the crash.

Those same sales will be the cause of the crash as the naive investors panic.

When that happens I won't sell my BitCoins as I am confident the price will recover for the following reasons:

Each new BitCoin is minted by a cryptographic computational process denoted as "mining". The algorithm described by Satoshi Nakamoto's original paper placed as strict upper limit of 21,000,000 coins that can ever be mined. At present there are about 16,000,000.

The mining process gets more difficult with each new coin. The last coin is estimated to be minted a hundred years from now.

What to me is the best argument for BitCoin's long-term price is that increasing numbers of merchants are accepting it for payment. The first such merchant was a Papa John's that sold two pizzas in return for 10,000 BitCoins. Today there are 100,000 such merchants. BTC 10,000 could buy a vast number of pies.

Amazon doesn't accept BTC because it has its own payment system called Amazon Payments. But its competitor NewEgg has been accepting BTC for some time now.

There is a very simple way you can still buy pizza with BitCoins: purchase a Domino's eGift card at NewEgg then use that card to pay for your pizza delivery. I was doing just that with PayPal when I was working as a Mentor for CodeMentor.

Not long after that CodeMentor provided the option of paying Mentors with BTC. I haven't checked but I expect there are lots of other services that pay in BitCoin.

The IRS has ruled that cryptocurrencies are assets, just like stocks, bond and real property. One pays Capital Gains Tax on the profit one makes by selling one's crypto assets. Sales made from coins held less than two years are taxed as regular income. Assets held for two years or more are subject to the Long-Term Capital Gains Tax rate which for me is just 15%.

While I might buy and sell some of my cryptos I intend to hold most of them for two years. If indeed cryptos are in a bubble, the crash will have already occurred then recovered by then.

I might buy an Antminer S9 BitCoin mining rig but am having trouble making up my mind. My concern is that the fans might be too loud.

An argument for buying the S9 was made by a friend who pointed out that I could resell it. What's really ludicrous about his argument is that a new S9 costs ~$1500 for late January delivery whereas used ones are sold at Amazon for $3999 for immediate delivery.

If I did buy an S9 it would mint roughly one coin per year, as predicted by a BitCoin Mining Profit Calculator that I tried. My next paycheck will enable me to buy ~$12000 worth of cryptocurrencies. There is a strong argument for buying it but I remain uncertain.

I won't have to make my mind of for a while as Bitmain only accepts BitCoin Cash as payment. I don't have any BTC yet, but I do expect to buy some with my next check.

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?

Folks, it's just one week until the Senate election in Alabama. We need every vote in the Senate. So we need every voter OF Alabama to be IN Alabama. If you're registered to vote in Alabama, save the date. And get to Alabama, if you're not there already. So you can vote for our Republican, @MooreSenate. We need Republican Roy Moore to win. For our party, for Alabama, for America🇺🇸. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., JUDGES, 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer puppet, terrible on crime! Go get ’em, Roy! #MAGA #DrainTheSwamp

Friday evening I tried to set up billing for soggywizards' G Suite Basic account.

Upon submitting my business checking account's routing and account numbers, I got the message "Invalid data".

I at first took that to mean I had entered the numbers incorrectly, but a few more tries convinced me the problem was on Google The Conqueror's end, so I filed a ticket.

First thing this morning Juan from G Suite support rang me up, told me he was unfamiliar with that error message, and asked if now is a good time for a screen share.

At the time I was on the bus on my way to my client's office, so I had to tell him that I could only mind-meld share screens tomorrow morning or late tomorrow evening.

Juan said he'd call at 9:00 tomorrow morning.

He also sent me an email with my ticket number.

G Suite Basic is only $5.00 per month. I just cost Google quite a lot more than my first month's service.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro looked to the world of digital currency to circumvent U.S.-led financial sanctions, announcing on Sunday the launch of the “petro” backed by oil reserves to shore up a collapsed economy.

The leftist leader offered few specifics about the currency launch or how the struggling OPEC member would pull off such a feat, but he declared to cheers that “the 21st century has arrived!”

“Venezuela will create a cryptocurrency,” backed by oil, gas, gold and diamond reserves, Maduro said in his regular Sunday televised broadcast, a five-hour showcase of Christmas songs and dancing.

Didn't Venezuela used to have a fiat currency backed by oil? Why would anyone believe that this new fiat currency, despite having cryptocurrency cooties, will fare any better? I bet that the public nature of the block chain is a significant part of the reason they went with this scheme. You know to prevent the people of Venezuela from buying the things they need on the black market. Like anyone would use the "petro" for that anyway.

And we may also have a sign that the bubble of cryptocurrencies is reaching an unsustainable high, if we have deadbeat dictators grasping at this particular bit of straw.

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

In the Spring of 2010 I was driving a really nice car while wearing a grey pinstripe suit. I saw a man standing on the median holding a hand-lettered cardboard sign. I pulled up next to him.

I pulled $200 out of my wallet then held it up in front of him then sternly said "No drugs! No Alcohol! No cigarettes!" then gave him the money.

"You just got me off the street!" he shouted in great joy.

"I was once just like you!" I screamed in agony.

"Pay it forward bro. Pay it forward!"

I gave him my card then asked him to call me the next day. I never heard from him again.

I was so upset that when the left turn signal turn green I very nearly crashed into three cars. All three of them swerved to get out of my way.

During the summer of 2012 I walked into a restaurant in Oceano California while carrying a shopping bag and a kitty litter bucket then asked the manager for a job. "Your kitchen floor needs to be swept."

"I'm sorry but it's the end of the season."

I sadly walked outside then pulled a newspaper from a garbage can so I could look at its help wanted ads. A man who watched me do all this walked up to me then without saying a word he gave me one hundred and twenty dollars.

I bought food with it, and shared some with a couple other homeless people.

A few days later I walked into a pr0n shop in Grover Beach. The manager said "Put down the bags." I didn't. I just looked at him. "Put the bags down NOW!"

I put them down then said "I came to apply for a job," then offered him a flash drive with my resume on it. That resume had over twenty years experience as a coder, with the last ten years being mostly self-employed as a software consultant.

"I'm sorry, I can't accept that. You need to apply to our head office."

"No worries," I replied then put the stick back in my pocket.

"How much do you think I could make," I asked him "doing work that I regard as morally reprehensible?"

He went slackjawed with his eyes open wide. "More than this shop makes in six months."

He was correct: as a result of my experience as a Quantitative Investment coder I had been solicited dozens of times to write Sub-Microsecond Precision High-Speed Trading code, mostly by Bloomberg and Solomon-Page. I never responded to any of them.

Such high-speed trading is the reason we really did need to Occupy Wall Street. Some Congresscriters have proposed a punitive very short-term capital gains tax so as to piss on all the billionaire quants but none of those proposals ever achieved traction.

I got paid today, in the form of a wire transfer from my client's Chinese subsidiary. I'm paid by China for Chinese tax reasons.

After work today I'm going to drop by the Portland Rescue Mission then donate a thousand dollars.

"Buy yourself something nice," I'll say.

I'm getting a similar wire in three weeks or so, when my clients OEM customers sign off on my macOS driver for a USB Video chip. My client just makes the chips, the OEMs build them into dongles for sale to end users.

When I get that final paycheck, I'm going to donate a thousand dollars to Right 2 Dream Too. It's more commonly known as The Tent Camp, and is a homeless shelter operated by homeless people.

R2D2 is quite forward thinking because both men, women and couples can sleep there, and one can sleep during the day. Every time I lost the bed lottery at the Portland Rescue Mission I was able to spend the next day sleeping at R2D2.

I'm also speculating - NOT investing: speculating - on cryptocurrencies. I plan to divide eight or ten grand evenly between bitcoin, bitcoin cash, litecoin, etherium and peercoin.

Just now I bought $1000 of etherium.

My credit union's security people do not permit debit card withdrawals by coinable - "It has a high potential for fraud," the teller told me after he rang up their security people. Three $60 and one $200 EFTs went through OK but I am uncertain whether the credit union will permit much larger EFTs. So I'm going to break up the trades, with the dollar amount I buy increasing with each EFT so I can be sure they all go through OK.

When I get that last wire I'm going to donate a grand to CityTeam Ministries. I speculate - SPECULATE now - that I'll make quite a bit of money off the cryptos. From time to time I'll sell some then donate to the Blanchet House Of Hospitality, Union Gospel Mission, St Andre's Catholic Church, all of them in Portland, as well as Vancouver's Share House, a church in Vancouver that serves a free lunch, the St Francis Catholic Kitchen in Santa Cruz California, Dorothy's Drop-In Center and Kitchen in Salinas, and Vancouver's Consumer Voices Are Born.

CVAB is a day center for mentally ill folk. They also do stuff like job training, they have six computers and a laser printer to enable the members to apply for jobs.

And an upright piano. The first time I saw that piano I was onto it like a pit bull on a pork roast.

"Consumer" is a euphemism for "Mentally Ill Person". I have a furious hatred of the word "Consumer". I call myself a patient. Look man, if you had heart disease, you'd call yourself a patient too, wouldn't you.

Two winters ago a Canadian Soylentil sent me three pairs of wool socks, wool gloves, three chocolate chip cookies, a Starbucks card and $50 cash so I could buy a pair of pants.

Please donate some of your own money to your community's soup kitchens, homeless shelters and rescue missions. I once met a disabled, homeless former welder who said to me "You talk to some guys on the streets, and they tell you they used to make six figures."

I didn't tell him I was one of those six figure guys.

I once earned quite a lot of money but for all the good it did me I should have burned the banknotes to stay warm on cold nights. But I live in a very modest way; I can easily afford to lose ten grand should the crypto exchanges collapse. I can easily afford to donate the occasional grand to those who serve Portland and Vancouver's homeless.