Yes they would if the document was under subpoena. If you mail the document before it is subject to a request for it then you might (emphasis might) be ok, but once the document becomes relevant to a court proceeding you are obligated to produce it AND to ensure that it remains producible. If you mail away or destroy a document then the court generally has the right to treat that action as incriminating. And well they should otherwise everyone could simply destroy any document or mail them away to avoid self-incrimination.

I doubt he asked either because then he wouldn't have plausible deniability. And if he was "uncomfortable" with the specifics once he became aware of them it didn't seem to cause him to act on his supposed discomfort. He was the president at the time and if he told them to stop they (probably) would have. If he didn't tell them to stop then he was the spineless misanthrope many of us suspected him to be.

That my friend is the very definition of a strawman argument with a bit of Reductio ad absurdum thrown in for good measure.

That's a fancy way of saying your argument is nonsense.

Ahh, plausible deniability. I'm pretty sure he didn't ask either and it wasn't as if no one ever brought the subject up. Almost everyone involved reports to him so he is responsible on some level regardless of whether he knew all the details or not.

The CIA reports to the president. Even if it was just 1 person that is 1 too many. I expect our leaders and those trusted with protecting this country to behave better.

Your ability to think of something more horrific does not mean it was not brutal. All you proved is that there are even more horrible things that can be done but that does not in any way mitigate or excuse needlessly harsh treatment of another human being. Just because you don't leave a mark doesn't mean it isn't torture and certainly doesn't make it right.

That sentence is self-contradicting. To my mind C cannot simultaneously be a "great language" and be impossible for most people to use safely. I would posit that to be considered a great language, the ability to use the language safely and securely by someone of ordinary skill in programming is a necessary condition.

Since we are so fond of automotive analogies here... While the power and utility of C is undeniable, it's kind of like a car with too much horsepower and not enough traction. Really talented people can handle it but most should drive something else. It might be amazing in the right hands but that doesn't make it great.

Better idea is to voluntarily test yourself on a regular (monthly?) basis. I know doctors who do this so that in the event of a lawsuit they can prove that they were not chemically impaired. If anyone questions them then they can produce a multi-year stack of clean drug tests.

Often there is very little or very illogical differences. In many places a teenager voluntarily sending a picture of themselves without clothing to someone else counts as a felony (considered child porn) whereas an adult doing the exact same thing to the exact same person for the exact same reason would not be considered a crime at all in some cases. In fact the teenager in that case may get the privilege of registering as a sex offender for the rest of eternity even if the picture was just sent to a boyfriend/girlfriend. It's absurd but it happens. The line between felony and misdemeanor is an often arbitrary and capricious one and not all felonies are particularly serious crimes.

That's an awfully broad brush you have there. I have an alcoholic who works for me. Served time in prison because of it and lost his driver's license for over a decade. He's been sober for some years now but he'll always be an alcoholic. He's a good worker, nice guy and very reliable. He just had a problem with addiction. You could easily substitute alcohol for cocaine and the situation would identical. Just because someone has/had a problem with substance abuse does not mean they cannot ever be trusted again. They have to prove they can handle the responsibility but a blanket ban against people who have had a problem in the past is needlessly harsh. You have to address it on a case by case basis.

Sadly that problem will not be confined to IT. Even if you try to change careers a felony record is going to follow you and (right or wrong) there aren't a lot of employers who are going to be willing to take a chance on an ex-con. Companies just generally do not want to take on avoidable known risks and a felony makes a job candidate into an avoidable known risk.

Your best chance is probably through personal networking but it's going to be tough. The good news is that there are companies that will work with people with troubled pasts but finding them usually takes a lot of work. If your skill set is in IT and your convictions aren't for things related to IT then I see no particular reason to switch because the same problem will exist regardless of what type of job you seek.

It's not but I can see how it might seem that way. A lot of the physics is pretty out there and not all of it can be experimentally confirmed, at least not directly. The logical underpinnings and evidence used are fairly sound but there is a LOT we don't really know. There is a lot of "if A is true then B must be true" going on but sometimes we're not actually sure A is really true. It's not faith but much of it is very theoretical. Almost everything relating to stuff like black holes should be taken with a huge grain of sodium chloride.

Sometimes that is true and sometimes it isn't. There are plenty of measurements we are quite confident about. Others not so much. Unfortunately for the lay person it can be hard to tell the difference. Apparently sometimes it can be difficult for those in the field to tell the difference too sometimes.

A course in financial math would be helpful as well. the reasoning holds only if the grid overpays electricity according to source (gee, who would have thunk it?), otherwise the best thing would be to maximize production (i.e. set panels facing local south) and "time shift" to use as much of the self produced electricity as possible: producing hot water, setting up the laundry machine to start the cycle at 12.30 .... and remember, when the buyer (and the taxpayers!) buy the panels, all the producibility forecasts are calculated for a south facing panel: shift the orientation, and it gets cheaper to buy olimpic cyclists and set them on a dynamo.

Generally only true if you write a check which can take a few days to clear sometimes. Other methods of payment or funds transfer are considerably faster. ACH transfers take a few hours usually. Wire transfers are nearly instant.

You could reduce the tax rates to zero and it would have at most a marginal impact. The biggest driver by far is wages and benefits. The tax burden on companies is trivial by comparison. When you are talking $1/hour labor in China versus $15/hour labor in the US, it doesn't matter how much tax the US charges if the companies are competing directly. The rate could be zero and most of the business would still move to china if the labor content is high enough. Sure it would affect a few companies right on the fence but that doesn't apply to most of them.

The simple fact is that US labor rates are MUCH higher than in many other parts of the world and you should expect the osmotic gradient of high labor content jobs to flow to where labor costs are lowest. If labor rates in China rise substantially (and they have been) you will see the business move back across the Pacific or elsewhere. Anything the President of Congress does will be a very tiny impact by comparison.

That's because you don't live in the right place. There are LOTS of unskilled labor jobs available in parts of the world other than the US and EU. Go visit China for a while and tell me there are no jobs for low qualification workers. Go out to a farm and tell me there are no jobs for low qualification workers.

Yes a lot of jobs we currently have will disappear and others we cannot even conceive of yet will appear. It's easier to visualize the former since we know what those are. Could you have anticipated the job of Web Developer 50 years ago? Probably not - at least not without invoking science fiction. Same thing will happen 50 years from now most likely. We have a hard time guessing about things that haven't been invented yet.

I'm a certified accountant so I'm kind of giggling over you telling me "how accounting works".

I presume you are talking about Retained Earnings which is on the balance sheet. Retained Earnings != Earnings. Earnings = Profit and that comes from the Income Statement, not the balance sheet.

Investment is FAR more complicated than simply transferring items around a balance sheet and it touches the Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Statement of Cash Flows.

It depends on why you are investing the profits into those Treasury notes and whether you are investing in them as a profit making venture or merely as a place to park cash intended for other uses. The accounting is substantially different depending on the purpose of the investment. Furthermore the effect on earnings can be substantial in future accounting periods which I should think would be obvious.

The effect on profit depends on the return on the investment though in the immediate period the effect is either neutral or negative most likely. You're making the mistake of only considering the current accounting period. If you buy a building and capitalize the expense it has some effect on the current accounting period but the real effect on profit is depends on what you can do with that asset. It may reduce future profits or enhance them. Without more information no one can say more.

Then you are returning earnings to the shareholders rather than reinvesting them in the company or other assets. Basically a dividend is an admission by the company that the expected return from available investment opportunities is low. The company is foregoing future opportunities so the long term effect on earnings to the company is either neutral or negative.

Not correct and even if it were you aren't considering the net present value of that $100m.

Which is another way of saying they are investing in the business. Amazon is introducing products (tablets, phones, etc), investing in infrastructure (warehouses, IT) and similar. They have a long term perspective and aren't worrying about quarterly results. Perhaps this will burn them in the end but my thesis that they are investing in the business remains intact.