BootmanLA

The question is not just how many third party candidates and how many votes they get, but who do they pull from? In recent years, the big concern has been "leftists" (Nader, Stein) who have actually been funded in significant amounts by the right, to weaken the Democratic candidate. And that's still a problem - Stein's sticking her Russian-backed toe in the race again, and the billionaires funding "No Labels" absolutely want to take votes from Biden. When RFK Jr. was talking about running in the Democratic primaries, he presented that same kind of threat - splinter the party during the primaries and hope it doesn't come back together again, which is why he was getting funding from the right to "explore" his candidacy. That's the same role Dean Phillips is now trying to play challenging Biden. But RFK Jr. is now running as an Independent, and his base overlaps Trump's to a significant measure (especially the antiscience nutcase vote). So there's a chance he could pull enough votes away from Trump to hurt him, if only in a few states.

There's a big difference between sodomy laws and these others, because there the difference isn't "outweighing benefits to society"; it's that there is no benefit to society to police people's private sex lives. And as a matter of fact, those laws against sodomy WERE enforced - at least, in some parts of the country. Not just by arresting people and convicting them of it, but by using those laws as tacit justification for denying gay people access to all sorts of things - security clearances in jobs, for instance. If being a criminal means you can't get a clearance, and you're admitting to being a criminal because you're openly gay, well, you can't have that job. That went on well into THIS century. As for passing the IRS thing: If you had a single fucking clue you'd know that was part of a much, MUCH larger law - the Inflation Reduction Act. That law contained, in addition, billions to lower the costs of home energy and to help transition to renewables, billions for helping get American manufacturing back up to where it was before offshoring, billions for improving agricultural practices - and a hell of a lot more. But apparently because you (as best I can figure) only listen to right-wing news sources, all of that IN THE SAME FUCKING LAW is overlooked and all you seem to know about that law is that it has more money for the IRS. Money that, in fact, will be more than offset because the new agents auditing business and the rich will pull in far more in new revenue (that was previously going untaxed) than the cost of the agents.

In light of the taxes and small businesses thread, I should note: I own and operate a small business as my primary source of income. It's a service business, not a retail or manufacturing one, so I don't have expenses like raw materials or costs of goods to purchase. Most of my customers pay in the low to mid four figures annually for the services we provide. Because we ordinarily don't take cash (I might, in a given year, have $50 in total cash transactions), I don't have any opportunity to hide money that way from the IRS, not that I think I'd take advantage of it if I did. So I'm not particularly sympathetic to "small businesses" claiming "onerous regulations" when the only "onerous" thing they're being asked to do is actually declare what they make. Conversely, I know a barber locally who easily grosses over 150,000 - he can knock out about four haircuts an hour, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, at $20 a pop. Most of the cuts are simple (lots of police and military customers) and over half pay cash. And I know for a fact that most of that cash never gets reported as income. One reason he's steadfastly refused to take credit cards or e-payments is that if customers stop giving him cash, and use Venmo or Zelle or ApplePay or whatever, he'll have to report all those payments, and he's used to making that money tax free. THAT is what fighting these disclosure 1099's is about. Is it as important as stopping the Donald Trumps of the world from cheating on their taxes? No. But it's part of the picture.

They're also Democrats. There's a portion of the GOP that are hard core white supremacists who will never, ever vote for a brown man or woman. And since RamaLamaDingDong is a GOP nutcase, he'll find the same reception that Bobby Jindal did in 2015. Haley's got only a slightly better shot.

Vivek's basically toast. At this point he's staying in the race to build a name for himself so he can get a contract with some big right-wing Think Tank, or a sponsored podcast, or whatever. He's never going to be president. Right now, only Trump himself can corral the Trumpist vote AND the (shrinking) mainstream GOP vote into one, and even that's not enough to actually get anywhere near a majority (and very, very hard to get close to a majority of the Electoral College). A small but nonetheless critical part of Trump's base won't vote for a brown man for president, period - and that portion of the base is more than enough to compensate for any votes Ramalamadingdong could saw over from the middle - most of which he won't get anyway, because he's focused on being just like Trump only brown instead of orange.

I'll add: collecting the taxes that are duly owed has NOTHING to do with "uplifting non-citizens" or "prosperity of unlawful migrants". If you don't like what the government spends its money on (even if you seem to have a very misguided idea of what what we spend, on what), that's one thing. It's another thing entirely to suggest that businesses that have the opportunity to cheat on their taxes should do so as a means of protesting how we spend.

Here's the problem with blithely using pronouns like "them" without an antecedent. There has ALWAYS been a requirement for businesses (small or large) to report ALL of their income (unless there is a specific exclusion, and those are few). And there has long (I can't say "always", but it's many decades old) been a requirement for businesses who pay another business more than $600 in a year to report that payment to the IRS, on a 1099 form. So if I'm Joe's Accounting and Nail Salon, and I pay Bob's Lawnmowing more than $600 in the year to do the landscaping at my office, I'm supposed to send the IRS and Bob's a 1099 showing that I paid that money to them. That, as I say, has LONG been the law - going back to the 1970's at least, and probably much earlier. And if I were ever audited, and I showed $800 on my books in payments to Bob, the IRS would look to see that I actually sent the 1099 to them and to Bob. That's how they verify that the payment is legitimate, because I'm going to deduct that $800 from my income as an expense - they need to be able to find where someone ELSE picked up that $800 as an expense. That's how it works. Otherwise, I could just write checks to various people and places (and deduct them as expenses), then they cash the checks and return the cash to me. That's tax fraud. The big problem for the IRS, for a long time, has been cash transactions - if people pay cash for a service, it's very tempting for the business owner to just pocket the cash and never report it. That's illegal, and it means other people whose businesses operate more by check, credit card, or electronic transfers end up paying full taxes while the guy who takes a lot of cash does not. That's a fundamental fairness question. But fewer and fewer people are paying with actual cash these days - they're using paypal, venmo, zelle, whatever. The IRS is using that paradigm shift in payments to treat those formerly cash (and thus hideable) payments as something that can be tracked, to ensure compliance with the law. And again, the new burden is on the big payment processors, NOT the small business. The small business just has to do what it should have been doing: report all its income. Anyone who thinks they shouldn't is encouraging tax cheating. Which, again, is your right to do: just admit you want small businesses to commit tax fraud.

I would never suggest someone ignore his experiences or refuse to acknowledge what he's seen in the world. I only caution people against thinking that such experiences must be universal, ESPECIALLY when there's discussion ongoing about how people are experiencing something VERY DIFFERENT.

The subject does interest me, because the subject here is "playing games to manipulate sex partners" - something the OP SPECIFICALLY ASKED FOR ADVICE ON HOW TO DO. If he'd simply said it was a fetish he had to want a top to breed him without asking, or whatever - that would be a different thing entirely. I go by what he actually wrote.

I'll say this: I can only comment on/respond to the chronology you actually laid out. The reason I ask questions about possibilities (NOT "making assumptions" as you put it) is to suggest things that might explain what happened that don't contradict what you wrote. If you're going to leave out important details, then you can't get pissed when people ask about those details as possibilities. Omitting things like apologizing for urging him to come hook up when you weren't capable (for whatever reason, and yes, things happen) suggested that you did not, in fact, apologize. I'm glad you did, and of course that changes the analysis. But that's exactly what the suggesting possibilities is for - to ask you whether X or Y is possible, so that you can add more detail to rule things in or out. If you're going to judge me for raising possible reasons for the way this interaction went down based solely on what you wrote, maybe writing a bit more would have avoided that. My experience is that we all (myself included) try to convey narratives in which we look good. When there are gaps in that narrative that might, in fact, point in another direction, it's not unreasonable to ask about those gaps.

There's a term for looking at your own experience and extending it to cover the world: navel gazing.

You mean "blocking immigrants seeking a better life instead of going after tax cheats," right? All in the wording. And yes, I assumed reporting of income. That said, there are thresholds for all sorts of reporting from all sorts of parties, and which one you meant wasn't clear - thanks for specifying. That $600 threshold for reporting is perfectly sensible - it's not putting any onus on small businesses; it's requiring payment platforms (paypal, venmo, whatever) who SEND the businesses money to report it. All a small business has to do is what it's always been required to do: report its income completely and fully, and there's no issue. And yes, big business and the super rich cheat more, but it's often hard to prove, because they've got armies of accountants and lawyers looking for loopholes to stretch to reduce their taxable income. Which is why most of the extra IRS funding is going to hire more auditors to look over those returns carefully and push back on what I would call "questionable" interpretations of the rules. That doesn't mean the IRS should just ignore small businesses that routinely and deliberately underreport their income. The 3rd party processor thing is the same kind of reporting that businesses have always had to do when paying for services, by filing 1099 forms for any business to whom they paid $600. What boggles my mind is people actually defending tax cheats.

As I've posted elsewhere: Some tops only want to top men who are hung well, because it reinforces their status as "I can fuck REAL men". Some tops only want to top men with smaller dicks, because they get off on humiliation during sex: "Why are you bothering to jack that little clit? Not like you can do much of anything with it". For both types - who admittedly aren't a majority of tops out there - I can certainly see why they'd want pics of the bottom's cock.

I'm starting to wonder now, which right-wing troll that got dumped off this site before is now back with a new handle and profile?

The part about the "federal airfleet" is the fact that he took a certain number of flights - FOR HIS JOB - aboard FAA-owned aircraft. The FAA is one of the agencies within the department he oversees. 1. To my knowledge there is no law or regulation prohibiting that kind of thing. 2. His predecessor, Elaine Chao (wife of Senate GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell), also took such flights. One such flight of hers cost more, by itself, than all of Buttigieg's FAA flights added together. 3. Sometimes, a federal official needs to get from point A to point B by a certain time and a government flight is the only way to do that short of a private charter plane (which is far, far more expensive). 4. It's been well documented that for most of his flights, the Secretary has flown commercially, not on government planes, and in coach. This is nothing but a bunch of GOP bitches trying to concoct a scandal over a practice that is widespread and blatant in GOP administrations but somehow only a problem when a Democrat does it. Maybe instead of opining that it's "or something like that" you might use that powerful tool at your disposal called the Internet and read what the actual controversy is, instead of belching out nonsense.

Not to support the law in any fashion: but as I read it, there's no penalty for having a VPN on your computer, per se. VPNs, like pillows and cars and knives, have legitimate uses. What the law would do is make it a crime (a misdemeanor, but still a crime) to USE the VPN as a way of getting around the porn ban. In that sense, it's not conceptually different from, say, using the knife to threaten someone. It's HOW it's used that would be criminal under this law - NOT the simple fact of having it. Again: still a shitty law, but we need to be clear about what it does and not mischaracterize it.

The one thing I'd suggest to keep in mind is asking yourself: Will the message of this post be enhanced with a picture - does it illustrate something that might genuinely be confusing otherwise - or am I just looking to post a (choose one: thirst trap/dick/ass/fist/whatever) pic here hoping to grab attention? If it's the former, go ahead; if the only way you can access this site is from your phone, I'd look for an app that resizes photos and upload the resized version. For the purposes of illustrating a point on here, you don't need a 5 MB photo. If it's the latter: well, I'd just advise not bothering. People who are reading forum discussions aren't likely to be impressed with the random sex pic even for someone stunningly gorgeous (which, we all know, is a completely subjective matter anyway). A rando shot of someone's hole or dick when it has nothing to do with the actual post is, well, just annoying.

It is a thing, whatever your view may be. It's just got a new name, and a somewhat clever one at that. For a very long time, men got together for mutual masturbation or "just oral", and nobody thought that was strange (other than thinking ANY same-sex sexual contact was strange). That said, if you don't want that, decline it. You do have the choice, though, to be polite about it, or to be rude (as we see here).

"You may well be able to enjoy yourself that way, but I know what I'm looking for, thanks, and that's not it. Good luck!"

Yes, but for some tops, it only counts if the bottom has a significantly big cock, because then he's fucking a "real man" (rolling eyes). And for a smaller number, it only counts if the bottom has a smaller cock, because he intends to introduce humiliation into the scene - calling it a "clit", telling him he can't touch his pitiful little cock, etc. For both those kinds of guys size - on the bottom - does matter.

That's "side" as short for "side piece". If they used the entire term, it might be clearer.

I get that, but then neither "top" nor "bottom" describes a main course, either. They sound like halves of a bun. "Side" is useful because it maintains the geometric approach (top/bottom/side) while accurately suggesting what's likely to happen: two guys, side by side, enjoying each other without taking it to fucking.

Lie? Where's the lie? I acknowledge that "side" is a relatively new term in the sexual realm, but it didn't take me long to find out what it meant: someone who does not do anal sex, but will engage in other sexual activities such as mutual masturbation or oral sex. Telling someone "I'm a side" *IS* them telling you that they're not going to fuck. It's no different than "Top" meaning "insertive partner" or "bottom" meaning "receptive partner" - it's a word used to describe a person's role. The fact that the role is "no anal" doesn't change that fact. And calling it a lie is, well, stupid.

You mean, when a president got funding to enforce the law, it was somehow a bad thing? I'm not sure which "$600" requirement you're talking about, so I can't address that. Perhaps if you were clearer instead of just saying "reporting requirements" (for what? for whom?) people might be able to discuss the issues instead of just watching someone spew, well, random words.

Just to be clear: this paper did NOT find that garlic extract was a treatment for MRSA. Rather, it found that garlic *enhanced the antimicrobial effects of the antibiotics* used to treat MRSA. As is rather clearly stated in the "Conclusion" section of the paper: "The results suggest that FGE can improve the antibiotic sensitivity of these pathogens to some antibiotics." So NO, garlic is nota "treatment for MRSA" (at least not according to this paper). It's a way to ENHANCE the effectiveness of some already-known antibiotic treatments for MRSA. Huge difference there.