December 31, 2019

RMD Age (for Some) Pushed Back to Age 72

Earlier this year, the House of Representatives passed the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act of 2019. This month it was unexpectedly included in an appropriations bill passed by the Senate on December 19, 2019 and signed into law the next day.

Right now, those with traditional IRAs have to start taking required minimum distributions (RMDs) by April 1 following the year in which they turned 70 ½. The SECURE Act, recognizing that people live longer, pushes back the age at which you have to start taking RMDs. Starting in 2020, you may begin taking them by April 1 in the year following the year in which you turn 72.

TRANSLATION: If you were born on or before June 30, 1949, you won’t be able to delay until age 72.

https://search.fidelity.com/search/getSearchResults?question=SECURE%20ACT&type=o-NavBar

December 28, 2019

Interesting read: How the right sold out to Russia

Now that Rep. Adam Schiff and the House Intelligence Committee have opened an investigation into the Russia affair, and President Donald Trump has darkly warned in his State of the Union speech that “America will never be a socialist country,” it seems timely to recall a long-forgotten tale of revenge over unrequited love, in which members of the Koch family, which had helped build Joseph Stalin’s oil refineries, found their investments nationalized and themselves embittered.

In 1925, Fred C. Koch joined his MIT classmate Lewis E. Winkler to found the Winkler-Koch Engineering Company in Wichita, Kansas. After losing patent infringement lawsuits to more established oil and gas companies, they sought business overseas. Between 1929 and 1932, during Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, Winkler-Koch built 15 thermal cracking units for Stalin, turning crude oil into gasoline.

Jane Mayer, in a book that grew out of a 2010 article in The New Yorker, an unauthorized assessment of the Koch family’s spending habits, “Dark Money” (2016), quotes Gus diZerega, a “former friend of Charles Koch”: “As the Soviets became a stronger military power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them up.”

Perhaps. But that did not stop Winkler-Koch, in 1934, from providing engineering plans and overseeing construction of a huge oil refinery near Hamburg under the direction of Adolf Hitler, whom Fred Koch approached directly, purportedly greeting him with: “Heil Hitler.” The Winkler-Koch factory became a major source of fuel for the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) and the mechanized tank and motorized attack forces that powered the Blitzkrieg into Belgium, Denmark, Poland and France. The factory was destroyed by Allied bombers late in the war.

https://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2019/02/how-the-right-sold-out-to-russia/

November 18, 2019

Supreme Court temporarily halts court order requiring accountants to turn over Trump's tax returns t

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/18/supreme-court-temporarily-halts-court-order-requiring-accountants-to-turn-over-trumps-tax-returns-to-congress.html

October 22, 2019

The Current War Trailer (2019) Movieclips Trailers

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2.


History lesson


I can't wait to see it. Being an old telephone man and dealing with DC powered telephone offices (48v) with batteries the size of refrigerators supplying thousands of amps to huge telephone switches and now placing a 9Kw system of solar panels(29) on my roof, the difference between Edison and Tesla is astounding.

October 8, 2019

Dick's Sporting Goods destroyed $5 million of guns, CEO says

Dick’s Sporting Goods CEO Edward Stack wants you to know he is not anti-Second Amendment. He is, however, against having his stores associated with any more mass shootings.

So, he took guns off the shelves.

And, to keep them off the streets, he destroyed them. Lots of them.

“I said, ‘You know what? If we really think these things should be off the street, we need to destroy them,’” Stack said in an interview with CBS News.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/nation-world/2019/10/08/dicks-sporting-goods-destroys-5-million-of-guns-ceo-says/

September 26, 2019

Tesla police car nearly runs out of power during chase in California

A San Francisco-area police department says it still has full faith in a pilot program to use a Tesla electric patrol car, even though the vehicle reportedly ran low on power last week during a pursuit.

The East Bay Times newspaper reported that a Fremont police officer in the Tesla Model S, which the department bought in March, became involved in a police pursuit Friday but radioed dispatch to say that the electric vehicle warned that it had only 6 miles of battery life left and that he may not be able to continue in the chase.

Fremont police spokesperson Geneva Bosques told NBC Bay Area that the Tesla was not fully charged at the beginning of the officer’s shift at 2 p.m. and that the pursuit didn’t begin until around 11 p.m.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/tesla-police-car-nearly-runs-out-of-power-during-chase-in-california.html

September 10, 2019

Ron DeSantis: feds, not Florida, have role to play in Bahamian crisis

TALLAHASSEE — As the humanitarian crisis deepens in the Bahamas, the head of neighboring Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, is taking a hands-off approach, telling reporters Monday that it is not the state’s responsibility to assist in the recovery efforts.

“This is a relationship with a foreign country. The federal government is doing it,’’ DeSantis said after an appearance at Florida State University. He said that after an aerial tour of the Bahamas on Friday, he concluded the U.S. Coast Guard is “doing a great job”

“The idea that it should be the state’s responsibility, if you think that then you have no idea how our system of government works,” he added. “I’ve been in contact with them. The idea that I would overstep the (U.S.) State Department is just absurd.”

DeSantis has urged people to donate to those affected by Hurricane Dorian through the Volunteer Florida web site, and encouraged Floridians not to cancel their vacations to the Bahamian islands less affected by the storm. But his approach is a sharp contrast to how his two predecessors responded to natural disasters in the Caribbean in recent years.

https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2019/09/09/ron-desantis-says-feds-not-florida-have-role-to-play-in-bahamian-crisis/

August 20, 2019

fifth Floridian charged with threatening a mass shooting this month

A Seabreeze High School student Friday became the fifth Floridian charged with threatening to commit a mass shooting after deadly shootings in El Paso and Dayton earlier this month.

According to the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office, 15-year-old Adam Guzzetti was charged with a felony after authorities learned he threatened to shoot and kill people at his school, Seabreeze High School in Daytona Beach.

Using the username FalconWarrior920 on the gaming platform Discord, deputies said Guzzetti on Thursday used a fake name and stated “I Dalton Barnhart vow to bring my fathers (sic) m15 to school and kill 7 people at minimum.”

http://www.tampabay.com/news/2019/08/20/a-15-year-old-student-is-fifth-floridian-charged-with-threatening-a-mass-shooting-this-month/

August 20, 2019

I wonder if WE will eventually buy Rick Scott's manse?

SNIP

The threat of rising seas in the most vulnerable state in the nation is only going to increase demand for government buyouts — currently a last-resort option that climate adaption managers, mindful of political push back, call “relocation.” Many activists put it more plainly. They call it retreat from land not worth the cost of saving, or simply beyond saving.

“This is retreat. This is not only an acknowledgment, it’s putting some real money in it,” said South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard, perhaps the most outspoken climate advocate among South Florida elected officials. “It’s a tip of the hat toward acknowledging reality — that it’s a better idea to have people out of the way than in vulnerable properties.”

As part of a pot of hurricane recovery money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development topping a billion dollars, Florida set aside $75 million to buy out flood-damaged homes, with $10 million earmarked for the Keys alone.

http://www.tampabay.com/business/florida-wants-to-buy-hurricane-irma-flooded-homes-in-the-keys-is-it-the-start-of-a-retreat-from-sea-rise-20190819/

July 3, 2019

You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence

https://twitter.com/RedSavina911/status/1146396120731586562