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[Trekkin]

Yes, that would be why the words sorta' probably mostly and afloat (as opposed to doing anything approaching well) were there. There was reason I was heavily caveating that

Please don't think I'm picking on you in particular when I say that the profusion of rather-probably-generally-basically-essentially-mostly on these boards has reached epidemic proportions, and it does no one any favors to sacrifice all hope of brevity and clarity of expression in favor of making safe, weaselly non-statements caveated into meaninglessness so that any attempt at correcting them swiftly becomes a semantic argument instead of anything substantive. Throw enough vague qualifiers in front of a statement and it can't be wrong, just misunderstood, but it also can't provide any kind of clarity. (It can provide a veneer of intellectualism, but that's a different, rarer, and far more intrinsically amusing problem.)

Again, I'm not going after you, Frumple. We've all done it. I've certainly done it more than I'd like, looking back. This is just a general suggestion that we all be mindful of this in future, because it really does inhibit understanding -- and this thread in particular is going to see a deluge of legalese in the near future, provided the Democrats' planned investigations into Trump actually materialize, and legal minutae are particularly vulnerable to obfuscating vagaries.

[wierd]

Legalese is DESIGNED with vagueness and weasel-wording  in mind.  Lawyers invented the kind of "can't be wrong"-ness you just derided-- or at the very least, if not invented, they took that ball and ran with it.

[Frumple]

Eh, I'm not going to stop phrasing things like that, especially when I'm taking the piss to a degree. Which I was when I was glossing over the whole yeah-folks-are-kinda'-fucked-anyway with sortas and mostlys.

I've got academic training in philosophy and business communication. Half or better the general mistakes I make in communication are intentional, right down to the I've got that itches at my brain but also infects the local conversational dialect like a plague. If I feel like being concise I will be, but I'm neither submitting these posts to academic peer review nor getting paid for them, so nuts to that

[Rolan7]

Hm... *thinking*

Eh, I'm not going to stop phrasing things like that, especially when I'm taking the piss to a degree. Which I was when I was glossing over the whole yeah-folks-are-kinda'-fucked-anyway with sortas and mostlys.

I've got academic training in philosophy and business communication. Half or better the general mistakes I make in communication are intentional, right down to the I've got that itches at my brain but also infects the local conversational dialect like a plague. If I feel like being concise I will be, but I'm neither submitting these posts to academic peer review nor getting paid for them, so nuts to that

OBJECTION!

Mr Wright, do you have a point?

UHHHHHHHH

[Frumple]

I shoved the point up a smiley's arse, rol. It's still there, but on the other side. That's how it functions as punctuation, you see.

[Rolan7]

Hrm, I didn't construct the joke properly then.  I was Wright, analyzing your post for a problem, and chose a meaningless segment to object to.
The Judge called me on it and I had nothing
Sorry, it's New Years and all~

[Frumple]

... hell, you did well enough unintentionally, then. A point was missing. The period.

E: also I have like zero exposure to the wright games. Couldn't recognize the joke more or less regardless of how well you constructed it :V

[Karnewarrior]

The end of a sentence without a period is truly pointless. That's why Trump adds five every time he splits a tweet.

[Hanslanda]

The end of a sentence without a period is truly pointless. That's why Trump adds five every time he splits a tweet.

I've been told by many people I have great punctuation, the best punctuation!! Fake News CNN totally lies about my excellent periods! Lock Crooked Comma Hillary up!!

[JoshuaFH]

I'll always be confused why the semicolon key, despite being one of the least used and least understood punctuation symbols; is given a prominent spot on the home row of a qwerty keyboard. You'd think or a period; or a comma; or anything really; would be a better fit; and now it can't be changed because mine and everyone's muscle memory are just so used to it being there;

[hector13]

I'll always be confused why the semicolon key, despite being one of the least used and least understood punctuation symbols; is given a prominent spot on the home row of a qwerty keyboard. You'd think or a period; or a comma; or anything really; would be a better fit; and now it can't be changed because mine and everyone's muscle memory are just so used to it being there;

It can be changed. I was used to the @ symbol being on the apostrophe key, as opposed to the 2 key. I can switch between them after a couple of attempts.

[Trekkin]

I'll always be confused why the semicolon key, despite being one of the least used and least understood punctuation symbols; is given a prominent spot on the home row of a qwerty keyboard. You'd think or a period; or a comma; or anything really; would be a better fit; and now it can't be changed because mine and everyone's muscle memory are just so used to it being there;

Well, we went longer than I expected without someone jumping in with the dogma of Dvorak users about how Qwerty was intentionally designed to be as inefficient as possible because colliding type bars and everyone should switch to their favorite obscure keyboard system because it's better because all those idiots who aren't them haven't polluted it with their filthy plebian hands yet.

The original 1873 layout had the semicolon where the M key is now, and it appears that the switch was made sometime after touch typing popularized in 1888. We know that Dvorak was still operating under the assumption that the pinky was weak as late as 1936, so the most likely explanation in the absence of any explicit rationale would seem to me to be that, once the switch from 4-finger typing to 8-finger typing made a distinction between ring finger keys and pinky keys, there was an effort to put more commonly used letters and punctuation under the former where possible. Presumably the A key, being a vowel, needed to stay where it was in order to mitigate digraph jamming.

[Teneb]

I'll always be confused why the semicolon key, despite being one of the least used and least understood punctuation symbols; is given a prominent spot on the home row of a qwerty keyboard. You'd think or a period; or a comma; or anything really; would be a better fit; and now it can't be changed because mine and everyone's muscle memory are just so used to it being there;

The semicolon is used mostly if you want to make an addendum to a phrase without starting a new one, from what I remember; it's still pretty rarely used though.

[Egan_BW]

Using a semicolon is like cheating; you get to just write as if you're starting a new sentence but make it clear that what you're saying is in the context of the first phrase.

So if you have two sentences about the same thing you can just glue them together; semicolons are great!

[McTraveller]

Holy crap.  I have no idea what my taxes are going to be due to the removal of the personal exemption deductions in 2018.  Sadly I missed that the 2018 changes eliminated personal exemptions along with the increase in standard deduction.

I have a nagging feeling it's going to cost my family of 4 close to $2000, because our previous itemized deductions were right about what the new standard deduction is, and losing the $16000 of exemptions in the 22% tax bracket is a pretty large number.

The increase in the child tax credit probably won't make up the difference (looks like for 2 kids, the child tax credit will increase for my family from about $1500 to $2800 - so a benefit of about $1300... if that's correct, the new taxes will be $2000 more than they used to be (22% x $16000 - $1300), even with the lower tax bracket rates.

To put that in perspective: a $2000 tax increase is effectively the entirety of the $2050 raise I got in 2018.