On the taxes; yes, tax deductible just means you’re getting a (at maximum) 35% or so discount on something (that you presumably had an independent reason to buy). Not too bad if you were going to buy it anyhow.
But there is free money in the Tax Code – a tax credit is a dollar-per-dollar reduction in the amount of tax you owe, which (money being fungible) means the $10 you spent on X comes back to you at the end of the year in $10 reduction in your tax liability. Cool/horrible depending on who’s getting the credit, what is being incentivized (credits tend to apply toward perceived social goods, such as investments in renewable energy), whether you believe the government should be trying to bribe consumers into particular behaviors. I got new windows in my place last year basically for free due to a $1500 tax credit for high-insulation-factor EnergyStar compliant home improvements.
Freemasonry is not a “secret society”. A secret society is one whose existence is not acknowledged by its members.
Freemasonry is not a religion.
A 33rd Degree Mason is not “the highest type of Freemason.” A 33rd Degree Mason is the highest degree of the Scottish Rite, which is an optional “appendant body” to regular Masonry which most Masons are not part of in any way.
Just wanted to clarify (especially since it was given as an absolute statement). It is the SDMB, after all (and I do find it interesting that personal rent can be deducted from state income taxes in some states. I would not have guessed that.)
Well, I guess that depends on your definition of “secret society.” I (and many others) use it to mean something closer semantically to “secretive society.” Wikipedia, and the Random House and Collins dictionaries for what its worth, agree. I think the Freemasons would qualify under all but the most restrictive definitions of “secret society.”
“Don’t put mulch right up against the trunk of your tree. It will rot the base of the tree.”
I’d really like to know how mulch that forms naturally in the world’s forests and jungles is some how cleared away from the trunks of trees. Maybe menehunes and leprechauns clear the mulch away every night?
This is absolute crap. I have been putting up to six inches of mulch right up against the trunks of my fruit trees and any other tree in my yard for over 20 years and I have nothing but healthy trees and more fruit than I can eat.
Bacteria and viruses are two separate things. I’ve heard a lot of confusion on this lately from the reasonably intelligent – someone on TV talked about viruses as if they were a type of bacteria, while an engineer I know thought viruses were produced by bacteria. Neither is true, although viruses can infect bacteria, and a viral infection can of course increase one’s susceptibility to bacterial infection. Bacteria are cells that can reproduce independently; viruses are generally smaller, relatively simple constructions of genetic material, protein, and not much else, which require a host to replicate.
Von Neumann is another good one. He effectively stole many of his best ideas from Turing, to whom he’d offered a job as a research assistant after he finished his PhD thesis under Church at Princeton. The first thing that Neumann did, when he joined the EDVAC project, was make the engineers read Turing’s On computable numbers…. What’s now known as the Von Neumann architecture was first elucidated in Turing’s monograph Proposed Electronic Calculator, delivered to the UK’s National Physical Laboratory in early 1946 (outlining the design of the ACE, a project they later cancelled :smack:). Von Neumann’s monograph on the EDVAC was incomplete and didn’t really describe the architecture that came to bear his name!
But then again, I don’t think anybody disputes that Von Neumann stole most of his best ideas: “Johnny borrowed (we must not say plagiarized) anything from anybody”, in the words of his biographer, Norman Macrae.
You say “bison”, I say “buffalo”. Regardless of what it is called in the scientific classification scheme, the name of the animal is “buffalo”. To argue otherwise is like saying the Holy Roman Empire shouldn’t be called that because it wasn’t holy, wasn’t Roman, and wasn’t an empire. So what! that was the name of the entity.
Obviously if you’re a descriptivist you might think that, but then where does it all end? Is the name of the large reptile that lives in the swamps of Florida “crocodile” just because some people don’t know that it’s really an alligator?
Baby carrots aren’t grown that way. They are cut from larger carrots using specialized machinery. Originally, developed as a way to use mishapened carrots that would go to waste, now the majority of all carrots grown are cut into baby carrot sizes for marketing purposes, as they are preferred by consumers.
Actually, SOME baby carrots are grown that way. Either they are small varieties, or they are harvested before they reach their full growth. However, these are pretty rarely seen in the average supermarket, as they are much more expensive than the cut and peel carrots which are generally sold as baby carrots. Carrots are not all rather long and tapering, or even orange. Some of them are short, blunt, with almost no taper at all, and others are globular, like radishes or beets.
But for the most part, what appears in supermarkets are indeed regular carrots that have been peeled and then cut down in size. And I have to admit that I prefer them, both as snacks and as ingredients, to the point where I only buy the cut and peel carrots.
