The returns are his to disclose. There's no (legal) reason to withhold them if he's truly under audit. He could always release the revised documents if necessary.
There may not be a legal reason he couldn't release them now (I don't know if he claimed there was), but there is probably a political reason.
My guess:
There are probably some questionable things on the return. Perhaps they're perfectly legal, but there's no doubt that anything out of the ordinary is going to be scrutinized by the public, therefore, if he waits until the audit is complete, it gives him another leg to stand on in defending his legality (provided they don't find anything in the audit).
It's more likely he's using it as an excuse. Trump was reportedly very critical of Romney releasing his returns (and the subsequent hit Romney took because of his decision to release them).
I was basing my guess on the fact that he's claimed that he will release them after the audit is complete.
Of course, there's always the possibility he's just saying that in hopes that we will have forgotten about it by then or that the election will have already taken place.
Straight up saying that he is never going to release them would probably be a big problem, which could explain the attempt to slide away from it, if the above theory is true.
His worry is probably that his returns would let people estimate his wealth and income. Trump's business is largely built around licensing his name, and its value comes from the perception that he is very wealthy. If it turns out that he is only worth a billion or less it could greatly reduce the value of his brand.
I loved reading this in 2008, was my first encounter with Atul Gawande and caused me to seek out other medical writers like Oliver Sacks. Thanks to @dove for reposting this incredible piece of writing.
We've adapted this at 18F. It's not a fork but it is based on and inspired by Thoughtbot's original project. Strong recommend. https://github.com/18f/laptop
I can't find a specific example off the top of my head but I'll say I've been managing a Jekyll site for a while now and whitespace errors in frontmatter and data files cause all kinds of problems. I'm not sure I could explain the details but it's a legit criticism of YAML. IMO part of the problem is that YAML looks very straightfowrard and is until it suddenly isn't. Whitespace is part of that problem.
As an anecdote on the flip side, I've been building Middleman sites for a while now and can't remember ever having an issue with whitespace in the front matter or local data.
Neat feature, should save a bunch of time. I wonder if they'll consider support for variables like {{ submitter }} or {{ owner }} that would fill in a mention to the user who filed the issue or the repo's owner.
That's the output, yes, assuming proper input sanitization, which I would not expect to be a problem given that it's github and they deal with a ton of the most dangerous kind of dynamic content (any kind of code) already.
With interpreted text languages, and indeed with machine code, there are no types to associate with a value and a value may very well be executable code. This invariably means that the only approach is to "sanitize" your output for a given context if the type associated with it means it should only be interpreted as data.
Interpretation does not prevent typing, and machine code is an execution format. The right thing in any language is: express the operations that you are going to perform in a form that clearly distinguishes between values that represent different varieties of thing. (Types make this easier, otherwise you have to implement more of it yourself).
You talk about code and data as though they were the only things, but they're not; getting one variety of data when you were expecting another variety can just as easily lead to security bugs as getting code instead of data or vice versa. Sanitization very rarely works - and in the rare cases where it does, it still indicates a deficiency in the underlying model.
The tour of duty metaphor isn't perfect, but I've always interpreted the "tour" part to refer to the term limit. Everyone in the DS and at 18F has a hard term limit. Can't speak for every municipal government, so don't know about your DMV, but most federal employees can keep their jobs beyond four years if they choose to.
I would bet that a DMV employee would appreciate a thank you, though.
Pretty sure it's illegal for federal entities to lobby Congress. The Anti-lobbying Act makes it pretty hard, anyway. But folks like you could lobby your reps and senators and attempt to get them to increase federal pay. This is a democracy, after all, and you are the constituent.
It's off topic, but the legal status of lobbying in the US always baffles me. Today I learned It's entirely legal for a company to lobby a congressman, but not a government department. How does that make any sense at all?
A department or agency of the federal government acts within the laws and regulations set by congress and is overseen by the president. Thus, even if you wanted them to do or change something, they could not. Congress on the other hand is set up to listen to and respond to constituents (constitutionally), and thus lobbying congress is entirely legal as that it what you are supposed to do.
I didn't mean lobbying Congress per se, but simply the level of interaction between the two orgs. E.g. does the USFS work on projects to help improve/streamline Congress and do Senate/House reps meet with heads of USDS and 18F.
I'm afraid my net worth isn't high enough for me to have any real say in the way our country operates at the moment. Maybe one day :)
