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Alhazred posted:I wonder if Oliver got in a bidding war over the leather thong or if his first bid was 7000 dollar. I'm sure it was a bidding war simply because he made the mistake of singling it out to tens of thousands of potential buyers who'd never have known it was going up for sale, as well as a smattering of "I'll show that fuckin' LIB" folks as well.
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Apr 17, 2018 05:21
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Alhazred posted:I wonder if Oliver got in a bidding war over the leather thong or if his first bid was 7000 dollar. I'm struggling to imagine which I would find funnier. It's baffling that the guy is so hated because he's the best of the former DS alumni (Sam Bee is a solid second) but god drat does he catch poo poo on these forums.
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Apr 17, 2018 05:24
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Apparently, all told, LWT spent $80k on Russell Crowe memorabilia.
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Apr 17, 2018 07:47
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Man, spending eighty grand on a pointless bit is the kind of thing I could see the Oliver of ten years ago cracking jokes about on the Bugle.
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Apr 17, 2018 08:35
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I'm kinda starting to think that this show that preaches moral responsibility could use its budget in better ways. It's still funny, but there might be better causes in the world than a loving Alaskan Blockbuster.
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Apr 17, 2018 09:25
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It's an entertainment news show. It's spending some of its budget on entertainment.
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Apr 17, 2018 09:34
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I also think they probably want to avoid doing something generous every episode because that's how you get people besieging you for charity. It's much better when they decide on a topic worthy of it and donate without being prompted or pressured to do so.
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Apr 17, 2018 09:51
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It's no 1.5m Bugaratti mouse with Rolling Stones playing. I almost wonder if its one of those things where they want to maintain whatever budget they have, so they spend as much as they can.
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Apr 17, 2018 10:11
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I'm not expecting miracles. Spend that budget on an extra episode that highlights something important instead of a week on break. Go an extra half hour when something feels significant. Pay your researchers more because they're really good. Don't buy dick rags from someone who may have been involved with Harvey Weinstein and at best was a serial violent rear end in a top hat.
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Apr 17, 2018 10:20
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Television: The show spends money doing funny things to amuse and draw in more viewers. If the number of viewers drawn in by their funny overall equates to an amount of money taken in by the network greater than the show is spending, the show is a success, and is renewed.
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Apr 17, 2018 10:30
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Yeah, when they spend 80k on a bit like this it isn't just the cost of making tv, it's calculated against how the chance of the video going viral can get them over 80k in advertising worth.
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Apr 17, 2018 12:57
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I bet many of these stunts get filed under marketing money. As far as marketing goes, it's remarkably cheap for its effectiveness.
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Apr 17, 2018 13:01
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Yeah much like manufacturing people don’t really have a good grasp of monetary cycles once it gets bigger than about $1000 a week. $80k a week on marketing stunts is a paltry amount when amortized over millions of viewers. That works out to 2 cents per youtube viewer, and the bulk of this shows audience is the millions of hbo subscriptions.
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Apr 17, 2018 15:06
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So Oliver & Co. bid $7.000 on Crowe's jockstrap because they wanted to donate it to the last standing Blockbuster as part of their comedy show. My question is, what was the person who bid $6.900 planning to do with it?
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Apr 17, 2018 16:21
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Rexides posted:So Oliver & Co. bid $7.000 on Crowe's jockstrap because they wanted to donate it to the last standing Blockbuster as part of their comedy show. Use it as a cottage cheese serving dish?
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Apr 17, 2018 16:23
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Rexides posted:So Oliver & Co. bid $7.000 on Crowe's jockstrap because they wanted to donate it to the last standing Blockbuster as part of their comedy show. They may not have come up with the Blockbuster angle at that point, I have a suspicion that they bought it and then went "Oh wow, now we actually have to write a segment around this" and scoured the internet trying to find somewhere they could offload it.
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Apr 17, 2018 16:30
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Looks like two Alaskan Blockbusters have tried to contact them on twitter https://twitter.com/BlockbusterAK2/status/985800760767074310 https://twitter.com/AKBlockbuster/status/985741039322320897
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Apr 17, 2018 16:38
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When they led with talking about tax day coming up, I thought they were going to do a peace on how the difficulty in properly paying your taxes in the US is actually a weird conspiracy from tax preparation companies. Most countries don't make all taxpayers calculate their own bill, and when California tried a simpler system, it was shut down by lobbyists and anti-tax politicians. Seriously. Not that Corporations routinely not paying taxes isn't a big deal, it's just that everybody should already know about it at this point. You don't really need 16 minutes and a potato to explain the concept, and they didn't even get into the interesting parts of all of this, like how the loopholes that allow this to happen weren't accidents, they were actively lobbied for and legislated, or how all countries are trying to make sweetheart deals with their tax laws to draw in business that never physically comes in a ludicrous massive prisoners' dilemma.
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Apr 17, 2018 17:45
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Yeah in some countries they just send you a thing of what they think your taxes should be and you just sign off on it if it looks right. I think you can just do it online a bunch of places too. Our tax code is a big bunch of bullshit, which he touched on, but even the way we file is backward, stupid, and advantages rich people. So par for the course. Corporate inversion and other methods of tax dodging absolutely deserve to be covered too.
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Apr 17, 2018 18:18
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SlothfulCobra posted:When they led with talking about tax day coming up, I thought they were going to do a peace on how the difficulty in properly paying your taxes in the US is actually a weird conspiracy from tax preparation companies. Most countries don't make all taxpayers calculate their own bill, and when California tried a simpler system, it was shut down by lobbyists and anti-tax politicians. Seriously. Adam Ruins Everything did a bit on that. Adam Ruins the Economy, as I recall. (If you happen to like Adam Ruins Everything, make sure you check the podcast, where Adam interviews the cool guests at length instead of for thirty seconds.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGVK4ibMI-Y
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Apr 17, 2018 18:18
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Psychepath posted:I'm not expecting miracles. Spend that budget on an extra episode that highlights something important instead of a week on break. Go an extra half hour when something feels significant. Pay your researchers more because they're really good. Didn't he literally do the biggest health care debt forgiveness ever? IRQ posted:Yeah in some countries they just send you a thing of what they think your taxes should be and you just sign off on it if it looks right. I think you can just do it online a bunch of places too. They literally do this here. I spent like 10 minutes doing my taxes a couple weeks ago. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Apr 17, 2018 |
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Apr 17, 2018 18:40
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IRQ posted:Yeah in some countries they just send you a thing of what they think your taxes should be and you just sign off on it if it looks right. I think you can just do it online a bunch of places too. In my country you don't even have to sign off on it. If you don't do anything it counts as signing off.
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Apr 17, 2018 19:15
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Orange Devil posted:
That sounds like a lot of work.
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Apr 17, 2018 19:16
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tarlibone posted:Use it as a cottage cheese serving dish? Nah, the jockstrap's tenure serving Russell Crowe is over.
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Apr 17, 2018 22:42
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well when half of the country thinks that either taxation is theft or the IRS is a biased/evil organization that should have it's budget destroyed, and 50% of the other half still doesn't like the idea of spending more money on things that might benefit poor people more than them, why we don't have those things really comes into focus.
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Apr 18, 2018 00:14
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It wouldn't cost more at all; the IRS already does all of that work to check against. Hell, the decrease in error rates as demonstrated in pilot schemes would probably save them some manpower.
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Apr 18, 2018 01:24
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One of the big arguments used against simplifying tax payment was because if paying taxes becomes easy, then people won't resent taxes as much, which ruins the platforms of anti-tax politicians. As if making tax filing stressful and complicated is some kind of sacrament in the name of being able to chip away at the idea of taxes as a whole.
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Apr 18, 2018 02:12
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It's the same argument the gun lobby uses
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Apr 18, 2018 02:17
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The fact that the error rate drops dramatically (California ReadyReturn dropped the rate from 3.1% to 0.3%) would free up the post-filing IRS resources to investigate deliberate tax avoidance, which I imagine is another black mark. I don't want to be one of those people that just endlessly piles on you, but it's astonishing to me just how broken America is. How do you even still vaguely function at all?
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Apr 18, 2018 02:25
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We don’t but we’ve been so big and fat rich it takes a while to die of starvation.
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Apr 18, 2018 02:28
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Institutional inertia is a hell of a thing
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Apr 18, 2018 02:41
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MikeJF posted:The fact that the error rate drops dramatically (California ReadyReturn dropped the rate from 3.1% to 0.3%) would free up the post-filing IRS resources to investigate deliberate tax avoidance, which I imagine is another black mark. There's a reason why "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is six volumes. Big powerful entities don't tend to just immediately disappear. It's more like they die and then spend decades or centuries rotting. Meanwhile the rest of the world has to just sit there and endure the smell.
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Apr 18, 2018 03:01
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The worst part is that at this point it’s basically on the honor system since the IRS barely has time and resources to audit anyone. Supposedly they’ll be getting a funding increase soon but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that people have been under reporting their income in increasing numbers.
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Apr 18, 2018 04:33
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Been like that for years, the dirty secret the IRS doesn’t want people to know is filing taxes is totally voluntary. They had a great propaganda machine around the time of the Second World War that drilled into society that it’s their patriotic duty to pay taxes. Now it’s slipping as society starts hating itself and figuring out there is no consequences to not paying. It must have been a freakanomics episode that explains the very stupid way our taxes work. Participation was like 98% at one point and is now like 70 something and that’s kinda crazy.
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Apr 18, 2018 05:55
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Got my novelty bunny book today
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Apr 18, 2018 06:11
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Invalid Validation posted:Been like that for years, the dirty secret the IRS doesn’t want people to know is filing taxes is totally voluntary. They had a great propaganda machine around the time of the Second World War that drilled into society that it’s their patriotic duty to pay taxes. Now it’s slipping as society starts hating itself and figuring out there is no consequences to not paying. It must have been a freakanomics episode that explains the very stupid way our taxes work. Participation was like 98% at one point and is now like 70 something and that’s kinda crazy. Have you got a source for this or are you steering the thread into crazy person court territory?
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Apr 18, 2018 07:35
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MikeJF posted:It wouldn't cost more at all; the IRS already does all of that work to check against. Hell, the decrease in error rates as demonstrated in pilot schemes would probably save them some manpower. I remember watching a video done by Cracked or something explaining the reason why the government just doesn't do your taxes for you and tell you what you owe is...~drum roll~... ...lobbying groups (including Grover Norquist, who doesn't believe RICH people should pay taxes - but you sure as gently caress should) for accountants, tax preparers, and the companies that make tax software *make* them make it complicated! I'm actually shocked he didn't bring up the return-free filing systems that other countries have somehow ~magically~ figured out. BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 08:58
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Senor Tron posted:Have you got a source for this or are you steering the thread into crazy person court territory? If you count taxable money that was paid under the table I could see this happening but I think the overall point was missed
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Apr 18, 2018 14:02
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Senor Tron posted:Have you got a source for this or are you steering the thread into crazy person court territory? https://www.google.com/amp/s/turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/general/what-does-it-mean-that-taxes-are-voluntary/amp/L5cjhVlhh. I can’t find the specific podcast with a quick Google search but filing taxes is entirely voluntary, sure there’s a penalty for not paying, but they have to enforce it too. More and more people are starting to realize the IRS doesn’t have enough resources to do their job correctly.
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Apr 18, 2018 14:33
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Invalid Validation posted:https://www.google.com/amp/s/turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/general/what-does-it-mean-that-taxes-are-voluntary/amp/L5cjhVlhh. This is just bad advice. 10 years ago I was working as a contractor on a 1099 and neglected to set aside money for tax time and when it came time to pay I said "gently caress it" and didn't. The next year I was a full time employee on w2 and at the end of the year I owed for that year too. Again I decided not to pay. I did the same the following year. 6 months later I got a letter in the mail letting me know that they have noticed. I didn't do anything. A couple months later I got a letter that said the IRS was levying my assets and sure enough I checked my bank account and all the money had been drained from it. This got my attention and I contacted the IRS, filed my missing years, and started a monthly payment plan and paid all of it back and then some. I figured "I'm just one guy and it's not a big deal, they aren't going to notice." Well, they noticed. File your loving taxes because you'll end up paying them one way or another. 6 years of $600/mo really sucks. I finally finished my payment plan at the beginning of this year and it felt really good to be free of the bill. To be clear I'm saying that "the IRS doesn't have the resources to enforce tax filing, so don't bother" is bad advice. Not that the link is wrong. The link is actually saying that "while it's voluntary if you don't file you'll be subject to getting hosed" much like I did. GutBomb fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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