Tootfinder

The IRS said in a new court filing that clergy and houses of worship should be allowed to make political endorsements,
-- abandoning an 71-year-old tax policy that banned the mixing of religion and politics.

Nonprofits should be allowed to make political endorsements and not lose their tax exemption,
the IRS said in the court filing.
Religious congregations, the filing said, are like families and communication between them should not be deemed “participation” in a ca…

IRS: Churches should be allowed to make political endorsements
Since 1954, the IRS has banned nonprofits — including congregations — from participating in political campaigns. The agency now says political endorsements by churches should be allowed.

Hmmmm… here is a problem I did not anticipate.
Every time I empty the main pond hole of water, (the actual hole under the liner) water returns within an hour or two. I’ve done it 4 times now, and it keeps filling back up with water.
Obviously there is water underground infiltrating into the pond hole, and/or the water table itself is above the bottom of the hole. It is not coming from either of the other holes because they both have the same amount of water in them as they did this morning.
I have “watered” the blueberry patch and hazelnut tree a lot with the water that I have been cleaning the filter with… and we also had lots of water flying around outside the liners yesterday as I tested the pump. So it is quite possible that the ground around the pond is simply well saturated.
I think I am going to have to just keep removing the water (and putting it into the sewer) until it does not refill. We have a week of hot weather coming. Surely that will be enough time for everything to dry out completely.
Otherwise I might run into some issues if the rains return before I can anchor down the pond liner with gravel and get the plumbing in!
How is time already running short!?
Never underestimate the ability of water to find a place where it is not wanted. 😆
#poolpond #backyardProject #diy

Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) immunizations chief
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis said Sunday that
he’s concerned with the direction the agency is going and worried about public health going forward.
Daskalakis, who served as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases,
submitted his resignation from the CDC on Wednesday in protest following the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) removing CDC Director Susan Mona…

Former CDC immunizations chief: ‘I only see harm coming’ with RFK Jr. leading HHS
Daskalakis is concerned with HHS's direction and the effect on public health.

Geno Smith on Raiders' doubters: 'Let them sleep. I don't want them to see us coming' https://www.nfl.com/news/geno-smith-on-raiders-doubters-let-them-sleep-i-don-t-want-them-to-see-us-coming

Light-IF: Endowing LLMs with Generalizable Reasoning via Preview and Self-Checking for Complex Instruction Following
Chenyang Wang, Liang Wen, Shousheng Jia, Xiangzheng Zhang, Liang Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03178

Light-IF: Endowing LLMs with Generalizable Reasoning via Preview and Self-Checking for Complex Instruction Following
While advancements in the reasoning abilities of LLMs have significantly enhanced their performance in solving mathematical problems, coding tasks, and general puzzles, their effectiveness in accurately adhering to instructions remains inconsistent, particularly with more complex directives. Our investigation identifies lazy reasoning during the thinking stage as the primary factor contributing to poor instruction adherence. To mitigate this issue, we propose a comprehensive framework designed …

From i-boxes to signed words
Alessandro Contu, Fan Qin, Qiaoling Wei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06182 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.0618…

From i-boxes to signed words
The combinatorics of i-boxes has recently been introduced by Kashiwara--Kim--Oh--Park in the study of cluster algebras arising from the representation theory of quantum affine algebras. In this article, we associate to each chain of i-boxes a signed word, which canonically determines a cluster seed following Berenstein--Fomin--Zelevinsky. By bridging these two different languages, we are able to provide a quick solution to the problem of explicit determining the exchange matrices associated wit…

Filing your taxes without paying extra for the privilege is apparently too "woke."
https://news.bloombergtax.com/financial-accounting/irs-chief-says-direct-file-is-gone-other-audit-tech-is-coming

IRS Chief Says Direct File Is ‘Gone,’ Other Audit Tech Is Coming
The Biden-era IRS free filing tool, Direct File, is “gone,” IRS Commissioner Billy Long said.

🔥 Grand Canyon’s Dragon Bravo megafire shows the growing wildfire threat to water systems
https://theconversation.com/grand-canyons-dragon-bravo-megafire-shows-the-growing-wildfire-threat-to-water-systems-263104…

Grand Canyon’s Dragon Bravo megafire shows the growing wildfire threat to water systems
Water systems are vulnerable to melting plastic components, toxic contamination and failures that can leave firefighters without flowing water.

Uspol
"We're not redrawing the districts to discriminate based on race, we're drawing them to favor our own party," is such an interesting thing to say out loud. On the one hand, pretense of democratic norms is completely gone; says a lot about where the country is headed. On the other hand, the need to maintain a pretense of non-racism persists? That's probably better than them feeling comfortable to go full mask-off about white supremacy. They're already flaunting breaking a lot of laws, so I wonder whether the legal or social-norms aspects of coming out as explicitly racist matter more to them here.
#USPol

The Trump administration may have just axed the IRS Direct File program.
During a summit earlier this week, IRS Commissioner Billy Long said the free tax filing service is “gone,”
adding that “big beautiful Billy wiped that out
https://news.bloombe…

IRS Chief Says Direct File Is ‘Gone,’ Other Audit Tech Is Coming
The Biden-era IRS free filing tool, Direct File, is “gone,” IRS Commissioner Billy Long said.