You can also write off the income of anyone designated at 'administrators' of the charitable organization.
Before today I was completely unaware of Child's Play, so I visited Guidestar to have a look at actual numbers. This information is from their 2007 form 990 (the latest I found at Guidestar and the one that probably looks worst for expenses). It fully discloses Penny Arcade's affiliation (gee, the IRS cares about people trying to wash salaries and actually checks this sort of thing).
Three Penny Arcade shareholders are "Directors, Officers, Trustees, or Key Employees" - none receive any compensation from Child's Play and the three combined received $515,725.25 in compensation from Penny Arcade. Looks like they're missing a huge opportunity to wash salaries in the way described.
They paid a $37,000 for a project manager to administer $384,059 of cash and non-cash (e.g. games) grants. They allocate the project manger half to program (giving stuff away) and half to fundraising. I am a little confused by the PM, since they list no employees or independent contractors in their highest paid list.
They spent $41,669 on fundraising expenses, most of it in three areas: $6000 for professional fundraising, $18,500 for the PM, and $12,024 for travel.
They held a fundraising auction that lost $23,441.
I have questions as a result of that (very quick and limited) review, but none in the area of trying to wash salaries. I'm curious about where the Project Manager expense actually goes. I'm curious about the disaster of an auction - why they did it, what they learned, whether they plan to try again. I fail to see evidence of the sort of fraud you are claiming.
Corporations get into charity for multiple reasons: good public relations, donating to related interests, belief in the cause. That doesn't make promoting or giving to a charity a fundamentally bad thing. Unless you have evidence to back up your claims, the evidence I've seen suggests they are unfounded.
If they wanted to help they would give food, clothing, shelter, or just money. Giving a shiny Nintendo DS to a kid with a three pound tumor in his abdomen, while his parents are slowing bankrupted by medical bills, does nothing...other than sooth the conscience of the giver.
This is quite simply not true. My oldest son was on treatment for leukemia for 3 years and 2 months, so I have spent quite a lot of time in the children's oncology clinic. The clinic we went to does not receive games from Child Play, but from other sources. The kids in the clinic love the games and they make it a lot easier to be stuck in a chair doing a six hour infusion. Yes, it's true, some of these kids need clothing or shelter, and a distressing number of the parents face bankruptcy. That doesn't make the games a conscience-soothing gift. They actually deliver a lot of value for the majority of kids stuck at the clinic.
Get a no fee credit card and pay it off every month.
You can't even get a cab or bus ride without cash.
You can here (Austin, TX). Credit card to get a transit pass - at varying levels of convenience and planning ahead since they can't use a CC at bus stops or on busses. Credit card in the cab. Last time I was in Chicago I paid for my CTA pass with credit at the station at O'Hare. Never rode a cab, so not sure about them, but even NYC cabs take credit cards now.
Learn not to grab hot soldering iron by the barrel or tip.
I got really lucky the only time I made this mistake. I was soldering a bunch of special effects for a planetarium show opening in 72 hours and was rushing. Reached out without looking to grab the iron and it had slipped off the stand. Grabbed the barrel full on with my right hand. Realized my mistake even before the pain reached my brain and had the presence of mind to shove my hand into the ice chest full of Coke we had. Left my hand in there for as long as I could stand it. Wound up with a minor surface burn on the tips of a couple of fingers, but nothing major. Never made that mistake again.
Can't answer the general question, but personally I'll be setting up something similar this summer for a two month round-the-US road trip. Having the WiFi will enable my wife to work while we travel. That's the difference between her coming on the trip and staying at home.
Yes, I'm being pedantic but this is/. after all. Granted, targeting may have a more specific meaning
You are being pedantic and it is your definition that is overly specific. Target doesn't mean "point at and hit". For example, my dictionary (Dictionary.app) includes the following:
an objective or result toward which efforts are directed
"Compliance, that's all we've ever wanted," said Senior Assistant City Atty. Wayne Winthers.
It's not about green. It's not about live. It's not about water. It's not about eco. It's not about reasonable alternatives. It's not about whether the law is a good idea. It's about compliance. Typical bureaucracy
I find no contact information on Google or Yahoo! or even this site that identifies or lets me get in touch with an actual human responsible for anything. They must also be scam sites. Or perhaps there's a failure in the reasoning that "insufficient contact information" is a real compliance issue here. For all of those sites, including Fabulis, I am able to figure out who the owner is and establish credibility without much work.
Now, there's a lesson. I worked for a firm that ran into a tough couple of quarters after going public. People started to say "we can't afford to fail" and stopped taking on any risky projects. They would only invest in projects that expected 10x return in a quarter. They never had another profitable year again.
"I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid, nor have I concealed any violations of the honor code." (Emphasis mine.) The "unauthorized" was key
I had an assistant professor for a seminar class who said we were "allowed to bring in anything you can carry, including the TA." One student actually carried the TA into the exam piggy back as a joke. Turns out none of the questions were hard enough to need his help.
Assuming you are in the US, you might want to chat with your experienced friend about his misconception, don't deduct this year, and go file some amended returns to correct any past mistakes. According to IRS Publication 526:
You cannot deduct the value of your time or services, including:
Blood donations to the Red Cross or to blood banks, and
The value of income lost while you work as an unpaid volunteer for a qualified organization.
Personally, I volunteer my technical skills by doing constituent relationship management technical tasks (database entry, mail merges, donor research, database cleanup) to a couple of local nonprofit organizations. I do it in chunks of 1-5 hours on an ongoing basis. Took me a few weeks to get up to speed at each in order to be productive. Can't deduct my time, but mileage is deductible.
Oh, I don't know about most programmers being good enough to invent data structures. In the 1980s, my friend Karen was credited by her co-workers at Sperry as the inventor of doubly linked lists. She encountered a situation that obviously needed them and got rid of a bunch of old, inefficient code. Exactly none of her co-workers had seen them before, nor had they thought of using something like that to fix the performance problems they were encountering due to poor data structure choice.
Heck forget memory limits, those were easy (he said, using his tongue to push his dentures back onto the roof of his mouth while tugging his pants up over his belly button), one time my lab partner and I re-coded our elevator simulator (written in machine code, not assembler, you wimps!) so that we could enter it with a hexadecimal keypad that was broken so the "E" key debounce didn't work. For you whippersnappers who never entered machine code with a keypad (not keyboard!) or switches, that means we rewrote it so that no machine instruction (one byte instructions) or data byte had "1110" as the lowest four bits. No that was programming.
Cyril, my lab partner, wound up being Bob Moog's protege and has become the key designer at Moog. Wonder if he remembers that afternoon in EE lab.
Then there was Bob in high school, who reconfigured RSTS control blocks through the front panel switches on the PDP-11/40 to enable root-like privileges. Now, that was art: several levels of indirection, the machine needed to be halted to use the panel, but it was a timeshare system and you had to get it running before any of the users noticed. Pure art, until that one time he made a mistake and caused a crash that rewrote the master file directory with all zeroes. That was a long night writing, testing, and running a program in BASIC that used heuristics to read the disks and a three month old backup (for getting user IDs and old passwords) to recover the directories on the disk. When the security guard came in at 3 AM, Chris (the friend helping me fix Bob's mistake) had to talk the security guard into not waking up the Dean of Students to report us. Bob got kicked off the admin staff for a while. Things got boring after that.
A while back I was working with a producer and studio engineer on a web site. We were talking about pitch correction and they told me they almost ignore being in tune (within limits) for deciding which take is good. They focus almost exclusively on timbre and emotion. Minor imperfections can be fixed in edit without ruining the sound. Their concern was the downward spiral this could lead to as vocalists get sloppier at learning the fundamentals, but they still did it.
The Chief is trying to go after people who misrepresent themselves as APD officers and staff online. So this is either sets a whole new standard for failing to RTFA or a gross misunderstanding of the out of context quote:
"A lot of my people feel it is time to take these people on," Acevedo said. "They understand the damage to the organization, and quite frankly, when people are willfully misleading and lying, they are pretty much cowards anyway because they are doing so under the cloak of anonymity."
The cloak of anonymity here is that people are claiming to be (sometimes specific) APD officers in online postings, but are not and are hiding behind the anonymity of the place where they make the postings. Poorly phrased and easily taken out of context, but not the the same as going after anonymous posters ragging on APD.
it wasn't a crash with an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs
Of course not. God killed the dinosaurs so we would have gas for our SUVs.
On topic addition: this orange goo sounds like oobleck with dye. My son made that from corn starch and water for his fourth grade "let's ease the kids back into school" science project last week.
I think it's time for all of us to add "I'm a lesbian" to our profiles. Let Microsoft ban us all!
Nah, you need to go search for profiles that mention "husband", "wife", "boyfriend", "girlfriend", or "partner" and complain to Microsoft that the explicit mention of sexuality offends you and according to their terms of service, they must ban the offending party. If Microsoft wants no discussion of sexuality, make them play by their own rules. I'd do it myself, but I don't do XBOX (Live or otherwise).
As usual from press reporting of scientific studies it's really hard to tell what to make of the conclusion. The article mentions animal studies that indicate BPA (the plastic) may disrupt hormones (especially estrogen).
The article suggests this is a preliminary study that only measured the correlation (so, yes it appears the assumption was correct) between BPA levels and heart disease and diabetes. It doesn't talking about removing the effect of diet, which is well-known to affect both of these diseases. If that effect is not accounted for in the study, it may well turn out that people who eat lots of meals from BPA containers (or have bad teeth and have fillings with BPA) tend to have less healthy diets as well.
Nowadays, science and technology have brought us an edge which we wouldn't have as naked human beings. And people with disabilities or serious genetic diseases -who 100 years ago would not reach the age of 2- can now survive long enough to even reproduce. Survival of the fittest no longer seems to be as applicable here.
You are attaching a meaning to "fitness" that is not part of evolution. Fitness doesn't mean physically stronger or more capable. Fitness doesn't mean mentally stronger or more capable. Fitness means well suited to survive and reproduce in the organism's environment. For example, the survival/reproduction benefit of being able to walk is much lower than it used to be.
It's not the humans are becoming less "fit", it's that the fitness function is changing. The implications of that for long term survival and adaptation of the species is a separate, and interesting, question often explored in science fiction.
I tried to look up the word "fidn" in the dictionary to understand what you were talking about, but my dictionary didn't have anything other than ads for California's Fashion Institute.
I looked up "fidn" on Google and the first thing it said was "Did you mean: find".
Apples and oranges are (canonically) not comparable because they're different fruit, so they have different criteria to be fairly judged on.
Apples and oranges certainly are comparable, within a particular context, just as Mono and Java can be compared within a particular context. For example, if I am seeking a way to prevent scurvy on long ocean voyages, I can compare apples and oranges and reach a clear conclusion about which is best. Mono and Java are probably comparable in many contexts. I have no basis for declaring a winner since in the context where I use Java (mobile phones that come with J2ME), the two are not comparable.
Slashdot Mirror
You can also write off the income of anyone designated at 'administrators' of the charitable organization.
Before today I was completely unaware of Child's Play, so I visited Guidestar to have a look at actual numbers. This information is from their 2007 form 990 (the latest I found at Guidestar and the one that probably looks worst for expenses). It fully discloses Penny Arcade's affiliation (gee, the IRS cares about people trying to wash salaries and actually checks this sort of thing).
I have questions as a result of that (very quick and limited) review, but none in the area of trying to wash salaries. I'm curious about where the Project Manager expense actually goes. I'm curious about the disaster of an auction - why they did it, what they learned, whether they plan to try again. I fail to see evidence of the sort of fraud you are claiming.
Corporations get into charity for multiple reasons: good public relations, donating to related interests, belief in the cause. That doesn't make promoting or giving to a charity a fundamentally bad thing. Unless you have evidence to back up your claims, the evidence I've seen suggests they are unfounded.
If they wanted to help they would give food, clothing, shelter, or just money. Giving a shiny Nintendo DS to a kid with a three pound tumor in his abdomen, while his parents are slowing bankrupted by medical bills, does nothing...other than sooth the conscience of the giver.
This is quite simply not true. My oldest son was on treatment for leukemia for 3 years and 2 months, so I have spent quite a lot of time in the children's oncology clinic. The clinic we went to does not receive games from Child Play, but from other sources. The kids in the clinic love the games and they make it a lot easier to be stuck in a chair doing a six hour infusion. Yes, it's true, some of these kids need clothing or shelter, and a distressing number of the parents face bankruptcy. That doesn't make the games a conscience-soothing gift. They actually deliver a lot of value for the majority of kids stuck at the clinic.
Get a no fee credit card and pay it off every month.
You can't even get a cab or bus ride without cash.
You can here (Austin, TX). Credit card to get a transit pass - at varying levels of convenience and planning ahead since they can't use a CC at bus stops or on busses. Credit card in the cab. Last time I was in Chicago I paid for my CTA pass with credit at the station at O'Hare. Never rode a cab, so not sure about them, but even NYC cabs take credit cards now.
Learn not to grab hot soldering iron by the barrel or tip.
I got really lucky the only time I made this mistake. I was soldering a bunch of special effects for a planetarium show opening in 72 hours and was rushing. Reached out without looking to grab the iron and it had slipped off the stand. Grabbed the barrel full on with my right hand. Realized my mistake even before the pain reached my brain and had the presence of mind to shove my hand into the ice chest full of Coke we had. Left my hand in there for as long as I could stand it. Wound up with a minor surface burn on the tips of a couple of fingers, but nothing major. Never made that mistake again.
There are II kinds of people in the world, those that understand Roman numerals...
Yeah, but what are the other ten kinds of people?
Why?
Can't answer the general question, but personally I'll be setting up something similar this summer for a two month round-the-US road trip. Having the WiFi will enable my wife to work while we travel. That's the difference between her coming on the trip and staying at home.
Yes, I'm being pedantic but this is /. after all. Granted, targeting may have a more specific meaning
You are being pedantic and it is your definition that is overly specific. Target doesn't mean "point at and hit". For example, my dictionary (Dictionary.app) includes the following:
an objective or result toward which efforts are directed
FTFA:
"Compliance, that's all we've ever wanted," said Senior Assistant City Atty. Wayne Winthers.
It's not about green. It's not about live. It's not about water. It's not about eco. It's not about reasonable alternatives. It's not about whether the law is a good idea. It's about compliance. Typical bureaucracy
I find no contact information on Google or Yahoo! or even this site that identifies or lets me get in touch with an actual human responsible for anything. They must also be scam sites. Or perhaps there's a failure in the reasoning that "insufficient contact information" is a real compliance issue here. For all of those sites, including Fabulis, I am able to figure out who the owner is and establish credibility without much work.
Or rather: "Don't be afraid to fail".
Now, there's a lesson. I worked for a firm that ran into a tough couple of quarters after going public. People started to say "we can't afford to fail" and stopped taking on any risky projects. They would only invest in projects that expected 10x return in a quarter. They never had another profitable year again.
"I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid, nor have I concealed any violations of the honor code." (Emphasis mine.) The "unauthorized" was key
I had an assistant professor for a seminar class who said we were "allowed to bring in anything you can carry, including the TA." One student actually carried the TA into the exam piggy back as a joke. Turns out none of the questions were hard enough to need his help.
Assuming you are in the US, you might want to chat with your experienced friend about his misconception, don't deduct this year, and go file some amended returns to correct any past mistakes. According to IRS Publication 526:
This sort of thing was all well-covered in the nonprofit leadership program I attended. Your friend might want to look for some education. Here in Austin, I have gotten good material and training from the Texas Association of Nonprofit Organizations and Greenlights for Nonprofit Success. As a board member I like BoardSource which also seems good for Executive Director or senior NPO staff.
Personally, I volunteer my technical skills by doing constituent relationship management technical tasks (database entry, mail merges, donor research, database cleanup) to a couple of local nonprofit organizations. I do it in chunks of 1-5 hours on an ongoing basis. Took me a few weeks to get up to speed at each in order to be productive. Can't deduct my time, but mileage is deductible.
Oh, I don't know about most programmers being good enough to invent data structures. In the 1980s, my friend Karen was credited by her co-workers at Sperry as the inventor of doubly linked lists. She encountered a situation that obviously needed them and got rid of a bunch of old, inefficient code. Exactly none of her co-workers had seen them before, nor had they thought of using something like that to fix the performance problems they were encountering due to poor data structure choice.
Heck forget memory limits, those were easy (he said, using his tongue to push his dentures back onto the roof of his mouth while tugging his pants up over his belly button), one time my lab partner and I re-coded our elevator simulator (written in machine code, not assembler, you wimps!) so that we could enter it with a hexadecimal keypad that was broken so the "E" key debounce didn't work. For you whippersnappers who never entered machine code with a keypad (not keyboard!) or switches, that means we rewrote it so that no machine instruction (one byte instructions) or data byte had "1110" as the lowest four bits. No that was programming.
Cyril, my lab partner, wound up being Bob Moog's protege and has become the key designer at Moog. Wonder if he remembers that afternoon in EE lab.
Then there was Bob in high school, who reconfigured RSTS control blocks through the front panel switches on the PDP-11/40 to enable root-like privileges. Now, that was art: several levels of indirection, the machine needed to be halted to use the panel, but it was a timeshare system and you had to get it running before any of the users noticed. Pure art, until that one time he made a mistake and caused a crash that rewrote the master file directory with all zeroes. That was a long night writing, testing, and running a program in BASIC that used heuristics to read the disks and a three month old backup (for getting user IDs and old passwords) to recover the directories on the disk. When the security guard came in at 3 AM, Chris (the friend helping me fix Bob's mistake) had to talk the security guard into not waking up the Dean of Students to report us. Bob got kicked off the admin staff for a while. Things got boring after that.
Now, back to my afternoon nap.
If Knuth had intended that one sentence to express all of the intent behind Literate Programming, he probably would not have written the whole book.
Yeah, I guess taking an eye for an eye would be sort of pointless....
A while back I was working with a producer and studio engineer on a web site. We were talking about pitch correction and they told me they almost ignore being in tune (within limits) for deciding which take is good. They focus almost exclusively on timbre and emotion. Minor imperfections can be fixed in edit without ruining the sound. Their concern was the downward spiral this could lead to as vocalists get sloppier at learning the fundamentals, but they still did it.
The Chief is trying to go after people who misrepresent themselves as APD officers and staff online. So this is either sets a whole new standard for failing to RTFA or a gross misunderstanding of the out of context quote:
The cloak of anonymity here is that people are claiming to be (sometimes specific) APD officers in online postings, but are not and are hiding behind the anonymity of the place where they make the postings. Poorly phrased and easily taken out of context, but not the the same as going after anonymous posters ragging on APD.
it wasn't a crash with an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs
Of course not. God killed the dinosaurs so we would have gas for our SUVs.
On topic addition: this orange goo sounds like oobleck with dye. My son made that from corn starch and water for his fourth grade "let's ease the kids back into school" science project last week.
I think it's time for all of us to add "I'm a lesbian" to our profiles. Let Microsoft ban us all!
Nah, you need to go search for profiles that mention "husband", "wife", "boyfriend", "girlfriend", or "partner" and complain to Microsoft that the explicit mention of sexuality offends you and according to their terms of service, they must ban the offending party. If Microsoft wants no discussion of sexuality, make them play by their own rules. I'd do it myself, but I don't do XBOX (Live or otherwise).
Find or form a local group around the Nonprofit Technology Network.
As usual from press reporting of scientific studies it's really hard to tell what to make of the conclusion. The article mentions animal studies that indicate BPA (the plastic) may disrupt hormones (especially estrogen).
The article suggests this is a preliminary study that only measured the correlation (so, yes it appears the assumption was correct) between BPA levels and heart disease and diabetes. It doesn't talking about removing the effect of diet, which is well-known to affect both of these diseases. If that effect is not accounted for in the study, it may well turn out that people who eat lots of meals from BPA containers (or have bad teeth and have fillings with BPA) tend to have less healthy diets as well.
Nowadays, science and technology have brought us an edge which we wouldn't have as naked human beings. And people with disabilities or serious genetic diseases -who 100 years ago would not reach the age of 2- can now survive long enough to even reproduce. Survival of the fittest no longer seems to be as applicable here.
You are attaching a meaning to "fitness" that is not part of evolution. Fitness doesn't mean physically stronger or more capable. Fitness doesn't mean mentally stronger or more capable. Fitness means well suited to survive and reproduce in the organism's environment. For example, the survival/reproduction benefit of being able to walk is much lower than it used to be.
It's not the humans are becoming less "fit", it's that the fitness function is changing. The implications of that for long term survival and adaptation of the species is a separate, and interesting, question often explored in science fiction.
I tried to look up the word "fidn" in the dictionary to understand what you were talking about, but my dictionary didn't have anything other than ads for California's Fashion Institute.
I looked up "fidn" on Google and the first thing it said was "Did you mean: find".
Apples and oranges are (canonically) not comparable because they're different fruit, so they have different criteria to be fairly judged on.
Apples and oranges certainly are comparable, within a particular context, just as Mono and Java can be compared within a particular context. For example, if I am seeking a way to prevent scurvy on long ocean voyages, I can compare apples and oranges and reach a clear conclusion about which is best. Mono and Java are probably comparable in many contexts. I have no basis for declaring a winner since in the context where I use Java (mobile phones that come with J2ME), the two are not comparable.