Although I am moving more and more to Linux I am GOING to keep at least one Windows machine around just to run Tax Act if nothing else!
Tax Cut (H&R Block) online works with Linux browsers. Turbo Tax online complains but works anyway. And Tax Act online at least let me start without any warnings. There really seems to be little difference in the online versions of these services vs the installable Windows program, FWIW to you. I replaced my Mom's XP with Ubuntu and switched her over from Turbo Tax for Windows to Turbo Tax Online. Except for the (apparently bogus) warning when first starting, it worked fine, and she didn't really notice a difference in the experience from last year.
The paranoid might be concerned about filling out their taxes online, but the truly paranoid would note that an installable program could just as easily "phone home" with your tax info, anyway.
I used H&R Block online. Unlike Intuit's offering, it doesn't complain that I'm using Linux. (Turbo Tax seems to work anyway after ignoring the warning, though.)
My financial life is pretty simple, though: I didn't buy or sell a house, didn't buy or sell stocks outside of a retirement account mutual fund, and didn't move from one state to another.
Trading stocks and funds in a non-retirement account used to be a huge PITA at tax time. Good news on this year's 1040 is that you can consolidate all your capital gains (or losses) by short and long term and avoid entering a line for every single trade. This quite literally saved hours of work.
"Modern" is kind of a weasel word, isn't it? I guess it means: "As far back as I can remember without a time machine, hypnosis or thinking too hard." Or really, whatever the author wants it to mean.
The comment I made on the top of the thread was not innocent. It is one of the "best" preserved secrets in the industry and people are actually socked by it. I only found it out when I went vegan. As a side anecdote , I once asked my sister if she knew how cheese was made, and she told me milk and cream...sure...ignorance is a bliss. Thing is, it turns it out standard cheese is neither vegetarian nor hallal
True -- ignorance is bliss. "Standard" cheese in the US is often labeled as containing "enzymes" without any description of the origin. So you never really know . ..
It really is eye-opening to make some of the foods you usually buy in processed form yourself, from scratch. Cheese, tofu, sauerkraut, beer, whatever. Even just reading a copy of "The Joy of Cooking" is enlightening, since it describes -- in detail -- the process of producing all kinds of things you never thought much about because they were readily available at the supermarket.
Not really. An automated CCTV system is accepted because we know why it's there. It's for liability reasons. It's to protect the businesses/properties in question. Most of us know that these images will never even be seen by a real person let alone posted to YouTube or worse.
That's kinda what I'm trying to say about our assumptions and reactions. We make an assumption that recording is anonymous and un-monitored simply because the human operator isn't visible. While it's possible that no one's watching a security camera, and also possible that no one will ever look at the recording unless something happens that needs to be reviewed, that's not necessarily so. It just seems that way because we're not watching the watcher. "Ignorance is bliss," as the saying goes. A CCTV operator could be following your every move as you walk around Macy's or chat up that attractive number at the local watering hole. Probably not happening, but we have no way of knowing either way.
People don't like being recorded, or even the possibility of being recorded, without their express permission. That's not going to change, therefore there isn't going to be any "general acceptance" of technology like this.
Seems people don't like being recorded by individuals they can actually see in the flesh, and just accept the recording of themselves by whoever mounts a camera on the ceiling or wall anywhere. And I don't think it's just the tacit acceptance of being monitored and recorded as a condition of darkening someone's door: I suspect that the average person would be far more uncomfortable with a mall cop pointing a camera at them in person vs. monitoring them from a back office with an array of pannable cameras as they moved about the premises. Even though the net result is the same, it's the apparent human element that I suspect makes Average Joe uncomfortable.
You must be new here, or don't you remember the whole Aerosols are bad for Ozone and contribute to global warming form the 80's and 90s.
An aerosol is "a colloid of fine solid particles or liquid droplets, in air or another gas". The particular aeorsol (CFCs) referred to by parent is explained by a sibling post, so no need to repeat here. Point is, that an aerosol can be almost anything gaseous or that can be made fine enough to behave sort of "gas like", including dust, VOCs, smoke, etc. That's how the term is used in TFA: terpenes -- not CFCs -- are the substances "dissolved" in air.
Yes, these are the terpenes that Reagan and James Watt (Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, not the inventor) were referring to. While they were sorta correct that you can't eliminate all the VOCs that contribute to smog by curtailing their emission by human activities, it was presented in the "complete solution or nothing at all" sort of fallacy. The whole thing got widely ridiculed -- albeit for the wrong reasons, even though it deserved it -- and Reagan distanced himself, throwing Watt under the bus. Or at least that's how I remember it. Memory might be kind of hazy, mostly due to all the smog back then.
There's no conspiracy to push down wages - these are real complaints. The same problem exists in many fields - there's a difference between good people and qualified people. As a hiring manager, when I complain about finding qualified people, I mean people that can show, in an interview, that they're open to and reasonably good at learning.
(Emphasis mine.)
Firstly -- and I'm not trying to be sarcastic or snarky here -- do you want qualified people that are "open to and reasonably good at learning," or people "that can show, in an interview, that they're open to and reasonably good at learning"? Because these aren't necessarily the same thing. You're looking for someone who interviews well, probably because you don't have that many other good methods of readily determining his qualifications. But that can be a problem, because a good interviewee isn't necessarily a good on the job learner. A worst-case scenario is hiring a guy that sounds good but is just a great salesman while overlooking a guy who would do a great job but doesn't present himself as well as the other guy.
Now one can certainly respond that candidates for jobs should be able to present themselves well. Being able to "sell" oneself obviously works. But that's solving a different problem. It's solving the "I didn't get hired" problem from the candidate's POV, not the "I can't find a good candidate" problem that HR has.
Also, you say you're not trying to push down wages. But of course you are. Not maliciously. You just don't want to spend more than you have to, do you? I don't go to the grocery store looking to needlessly spend more than I have to on fruit. But on the other hand, you're not usually gonna get top quality produce at bargain prices. You pay your money and make your choice.
"Career opportunities" don't come with pay cuts. They come with pay raises. Run.
True. What they pay you tell you how much they value you. Sounds backwards at first, but if they pay you more it makes them find you more valuable. Think about your own experiences: when you pay more for one choice than another, it reinforces your belief that it was worth more.
You gotta do what you gotta do, but keep in mind that pay cuts are permanent. You're never going to get back to what you'd be making if you kept the better paying position. Maybe you'll be the exception, but probably not.
So if you're thinking that eventually you'll get back on track salary-wise in your job decision calculus, run the pros and cons again with that in mind. Some things are worth more than money, just make sure you know how much more.
What you've just stated is a "dodgy fact." Apparently you can invent pretty much any claim about the constitution, the actual law be damned.
The thing with the cold fjord posts is they're almost too predictable. Someone states something like "NSA doing nasty unconstitutional stuff" and there's a immediately a naive rebuttal like: "Nuh uh, not true, you're the nasty one." Like he's supposed to be caught, maybe to distract from the real -- more subtle -- shills. A "search satisfaction error" exploit.
So there's a link, but it is a little disingenuous to say he's suing to stop fracking. His suit (linked from TFA) is about the water tower. He doesn't want a high-rise water tower across the street.
He's actually ok with a low-rise water tower that he can't really see from his ranch.
So, over-react much, headline writer?
If there weren't fracking to be done then the water wouldn't be needed, then there wouldn't be a water tower or the extra truck traffic, so it's not unrelated to fracking. Perhaps not about groundwater or earthquakes or whatever, but still an issue.
And this actually brings up a less-often mentioned concern about gas extraction -- the conflict between water and energy resources. You need water to produce energy (and energy to "produce" water). IEEE Spectrum had a good feature on this.
What is privacy these days? The USPS tracks every letter, or at least takes a picture of it (who knows what they do with that).
I looked into that very issue. Turns out, it's actually not as nefarious is you might think at first. When you give a letter or parcel to them, they read the address on it and then they go and deliver it to that address. Blew me away.
"Of all time" seems to mean "that we can think of off the top of our heads," because there are quite a tech few mergers in the list bigger than $16 Billion.
First off, as the subject says: beware of a customer/client who comes to you with "I've come up with this great solution that I'd like you to apply to this problem." Because, for one thing, they've already taken you out of the brainstorming, refining ideas and feasibility phases -- and since they've come to you, it's out of their area of expertise, so those steps probably weren't exactly done in an expert manner. There's a good chance that you won't get such a thing to work, then you're gonna have a problem getting paid for basically proving that it was a bad idea. Because workable or not, you're still gonna have spent your time and resources on it.
Secondly, this sounds like something way outside the core business of a party-bus sort of service. Because really, a selective photography-denial device would have a considerably bigger market than just protecting the interests of the owners of a rolling disco/bar/whorehouse/whatever. Who wouldn't want what is essentially a cloaking device? That business would dwarf whatever racket they're in now.
I'd tell them no, or direct them to a security device vendor instead. But if you really want to try anyway, maybe get them to pay for a "feasibility study" or something like that. It won't cost them nearly as much as a failed project, but you won't have to turn away business that you might need.
I know you think so, but recently we had mold in our house. The "EPA approved" method of mold remediation was complete overkill for what was actually necessary to remove the mold. No we don't need to tear down half our house to get rid of 2 square feet of mold. We got another guy who just cut out the moldy parts and washed everything with a mold-killer, dried it and then painted it with Kilz. The mold hasn't returned and we saved over $10,000.
What part of the science says that the only way to kill mold is to tear down half my house? When in fact, it has been completely removed and has not returned for over 3 years.
Just because a guy tried so sucker you with his claimed interpretations of government regulations -- that coincidentally cost more and made more profit -- doesn't necessarily prove that the government regulations are overkill. The extra money might be a motive for him. To beat this dead horse a little more, I'm suggesting that the guy was using the old "Government regulations require this massively expensive procedure" trick. It's not new. The trick that is. To scam people.
Here's hoping people will look past their pet political stereotypes and commend those who defend fact-based science in pursuit of better legislation and governance.
This is a bill coming from the GOP??? and its pro transparent science?? Color me skeptical, but this looks like a good idea to me
Ordinary laws get boring names. The crazier the legislation, the more likely it'll be named something interesting-sounding that implies the opposite of what it does. Like "USA Patriot act".
Slashdot Mirror
Although I am moving more and more to Linux I am GOING to keep at least one Windows machine around just to run Tax Act if nothing else!
Tax Cut (H&R Block) online works with Linux browsers. Turbo Tax online complains but works anyway. And Tax Act online at least let me start without any warnings. There really seems to be little difference in the online versions of these services vs the installable Windows program, FWIW to you. I replaced my Mom's XP with Ubuntu and switched her over from Turbo Tax for Windows to Turbo Tax Online. Except for the (apparently bogus) warning when first starting, it worked fine, and she didn't really notice a difference in the experience from last year.
The paranoid might be concerned about filling out their taxes online, but the truly paranoid would note that an installable program could just as easily "phone home" with your tax info, anyway.
I used H&R Block online. Unlike Intuit's offering, it doesn't complain that I'm using Linux. (Turbo Tax seems to work anyway after ignoring the warning, though.)
My financial life is pretty simple, though: I didn't buy or sell a house, didn't buy or sell stocks outside of a retirement account mutual fund, and didn't move from one state to another.
Trading stocks and funds in a non-retirement account used to be a huge PITA at tax time. Good news on this year's 1040 is that you can consolidate all your capital gains (or losses) by short and long term and avoid entering a line for every single trade. This quite literally saved hours of work.
Maybe next time, the feds will wise up and get a month-to-month pay in advance eavesdropping plan and avoid bill shock.
Snake... surely?
(or is it all about the shiny...?)
"Modern" is kind of a weasel word, isn't it? I guess it means: "As far back as I can remember without a time machine, hypnosis or thinking too hard." Or really, whatever the author wants it to mean.
It wasn't a Nazi plane. it was Italian
French, Italian, whatever.
The comment I made on the top of the thread was not innocent. It is one of the "best" preserved secrets in the industry and people are actually socked by it. I only found it out when I went vegan. As a side anecdote , I once asked my sister if she knew how cheese was made, and she told me milk and cream...sure...ignorance is a bliss. Thing is, it turns it out standard cheese is neither vegetarian nor hallal
True -- ignorance is bliss. "Standard" cheese in the US is often labeled as containing "enzymes" without any description of the origin. So you never really know . . .
It really is eye-opening to make some of the foods you usually buy in processed form yourself, from scratch. Cheese, tofu, sauerkraut, beer, whatever. Even just reading a copy of "The Joy of Cooking" is enlightening, since it describes -- in detail -- the process of producing all kinds of things you never thought much about because they were readily available at the supermarket.
Is there a reason it can't be hallal? Arab groceries sell stomachs over here.
Both Kosher and Halal dietary laws mandate separation of milk and meat.
Not really. An automated CCTV system is accepted because we know why it's there. It's for liability reasons. It's to protect the businesses/properties in question. Most of us know that these images will never even be seen by a real person let alone posted to YouTube or worse.
That's kinda what I'm trying to say about our assumptions and reactions. We make an assumption that recording is anonymous and un-monitored simply because the human operator isn't visible. While it's possible that no one's watching a security camera, and also possible that no one will ever look at the recording unless something happens that needs to be reviewed, that's not necessarily so. It just seems that way because we're not watching the watcher. "Ignorance is bliss," as the saying goes. A CCTV operator could be following your every move as you walk around Macy's or chat up that attractive number at the local watering hole. Probably not happening, but we have no way of knowing either way.
People don't like being recorded, or even the possibility of being recorded, without their express permission. That's not going to change, therefore there isn't going to be any "general acceptance" of technology like this.
Seems people don't like being recorded by individuals they can actually see in the flesh, and just accept the recording of themselves by whoever mounts a camera on the ceiling or wall anywhere. And I don't think it's just the tacit acceptance of being monitored and recorded as a condition of darkening someone's door: I suspect that the average person would be far more uncomfortable with a mall cop pointing a camera at them in person vs. monitoring them from a back office with an array of pannable cameras as they moved about the premises. Even though the net result is the same, it's the apparent human element that I suspect makes Average Joe uncomfortable.
You must be new here, or don't you remember the whole Aerosols are bad for Ozone and contribute to global warming form the 80's and 90s.
An aerosol is "a colloid of fine solid particles or liquid droplets, in air or another gas". The particular aeorsol (CFCs) referred to by parent is explained by a sibling post, so no need to repeat here. Point is, that an aerosol can be almost anything gaseous or that can be made fine enough to behave sort of "gas like", including dust, VOCs, smoke, etc. That's how the term is used in TFA: terpenes -- not CFCs -- are the substances "dissolved" in air.
"Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do." Terpenes are a well known component of aerosol away from cities, and studied since many years. Nothing new in the headline, after all...
Yes, these are the terpenes that Reagan and James Watt (Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, not the inventor) were referring to. While they were sorta correct that you can't eliminate all the VOCs that contribute to smog by curtailing their emission by human activities, it was presented in the "complete solution or nothing at all" sort of fallacy. The whole thing got widely ridiculed -- albeit for the wrong reasons, even though it deserved it -- and Reagan distanced himself, throwing Watt under the bus. Or at least that's how I remember it. Memory might be kind of hazy, mostly due to all the smog back then.
The economist says there's never a shortage, just a shortage at a given price. E.g., Robert R. Prechter, Jr: "In a free market, shortages are impossible; there is only a price. Rubies and Picassos are scarce, but there's never a shortage of them. You can buy all you want any day of the week. Just pay the price." You can have all you want if you're willing to pay more.
There's no conspiracy to push down wages - these are real complaints. The same problem exists in many fields - there's a difference between good people and qualified people. As a hiring manager, when I complain about finding qualified people, I mean people that can show, in an interview, that they're open to and reasonably good at learning.
(Emphasis mine.)
Firstly -- and I'm not trying to be sarcastic or snarky here -- do you want qualified people that are "open to and reasonably good at learning," or people "that can show, in an interview, that they're open to and reasonably good at learning"? Because these aren't necessarily the same thing. You're looking for someone who interviews well, probably because you don't have that many other good methods of readily determining his qualifications. But that can be a problem, because a good interviewee isn't necessarily a good on the job learner. A worst-case scenario is hiring a guy that sounds good but is just a great salesman while overlooking a guy who would do a great job but doesn't present himself as well as the other guy.
Now one can certainly respond that candidates for jobs should be able to present themselves well. Being able to "sell" oneself obviously works. But that's solving a different problem. It's solving the "I didn't get hired" problem from the candidate's POV, not the "I can't find a good candidate" problem that HR has.
Also, you say you're not trying to push down wages. But of course you are. Not maliciously. You just don't want to spend more than you have to, do you? I don't go to the grocery store looking to needlessly spend more than I have to on fruit. But on the other hand, you're not usually gonna get top quality produce at bargain prices. You pay your money and make your choice.
"Career opportunities" don't come with pay cuts. They come with pay raises. Run.
True. What they pay you tell you how much they value you. Sounds backwards at first, but if they pay you more it makes them find you more valuable. Think about your own experiences: when you pay more for one choice than another, it reinforces your belief that it was worth more.
You gotta do what you gotta do, but keep in mind that pay cuts are permanent. You're never going to get back to what you'd be making if you kept the better paying position. Maybe you'll be the exception, but probably not.
So if you're thinking that eventually you'll get back on track salary-wise in your job decision calculus, run the pros and cons again with that in mind. Some things are worth more than money, just make sure you know how much more.
What you've just stated is a "dodgy fact." Apparently you can invent pretty much any claim about the constitution, the actual law be damned.
The thing with the cold fjord posts is they're almost too predictable. Someone states something like "NSA doing nasty unconstitutional stuff" and there's a immediately a naive rebuttal like: "Nuh uh, not true, you're the nasty one." Like he's supposed to be caught, maybe to distract from the real -- more subtle -- shills. A "search satisfaction error" exploit.
So there's a link, but it is a little disingenuous to say he's suing to stop fracking. His suit (linked from TFA) is about the water tower. He doesn't want a high-rise water tower across the street. He's actually ok with a low-rise water tower that he can't really see from his ranch. So, over-react much, headline writer?
If there weren't fracking to be done then the water wouldn't be needed, then there wouldn't be a water tower or the extra truck traffic, so it's not unrelated to fracking. Perhaps not about groundwater or earthquakes or whatever, but still an issue.
And this actually brings up a less-often mentioned concern about gas extraction -- the conflict between water and energy resources. You need water to produce energy (and energy to "produce" water). IEEE Spectrum had a good feature on this.
Or better yet, why can't the manufacturer just email everybody a flash drive
Channeling Morbo...
EMAIL DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOODNIGHT!
Then fax it to them.
What is privacy these days? The USPS tracks every letter, or at least takes a picture of it (who knows what they do with that).
I looked into that very issue. Turns out, it's actually not as nefarious is you might think at first. When you give a letter or parcel to them, they read the address on it and then they go and deliver it to that address. Blew me away.
I would put AOL Time Warner as the biggest tech industry acquisition...
Yeah. $160 Billion. In 2000 dollars.
"Of all time" seems to mean "that we can think of off the top of our heads," because there are quite a tech few mergers in the list bigger than $16 Billion.
First off, as the subject says: beware of a customer/client who comes to you with "I've come up with this great solution that I'd like you to apply to this problem." Because, for one thing, they've already taken you out of the brainstorming, refining ideas and feasibility phases -- and since they've come to you, it's out of their area of expertise, so those steps probably weren't exactly done in an expert manner. There's a good chance that you won't get such a thing to work, then you're gonna have a problem getting paid for basically proving that it was a bad idea. Because workable or not, you're still gonna have spent your time and resources on it.
Secondly, this sounds like something way outside the core business of a party-bus sort of service. Because really, a selective photography-denial device would have a considerably bigger market than just protecting the interests of the owners of a rolling disco/bar/whorehouse/whatever. Who wouldn't want what is essentially a cloaking device? That business would dwarf whatever racket they're in now.
I'd tell them no, or direct them to a security device vendor instead. But if you really want to try anyway, maybe get them to pay for a "feasibility study" or something like that. It won't cost them nearly as much as a failed project, but you won't have to turn away business that you might need.
I know you think so, but recently we had mold in our house. The "EPA approved" method of mold remediation was complete overkill for what was actually necessary to remove the mold. No we don't need to tear down half our house to get rid of 2 square feet of mold. We got another guy who just cut out the moldy parts and washed everything with a mold-killer, dried it and then painted it with Kilz. The mold hasn't returned and we saved over $10,000.
What part of the science says that the only way to kill mold is to tear down half my house? When in fact, it has been completely removed and has not returned for over 3 years.
Just because a guy tried so sucker you with his claimed interpretations of government regulations -- that coincidentally cost more and made more profit -- doesn't necessarily prove that the government regulations are overkill. The extra money might be a motive for him. To beat this dead horse a little more, I'm suggesting that the guy was using the old "Government regulations require this massively expensive procedure" trick. It's not new. The trick that is. To scam people.
Here's hoping people will look past their pet political stereotypes and commend those who defend fact-based science in pursuit of better legislation and governance.
Now that's funny.
This is a bill coming from the GOP??? and its pro transparent science?? Color me skeptical, but this looks like a good idea to me
Ordinary laws get boring names. The crazier the legislation, the more likely it'll be named something interesting-sounding that implies the opposite of what it does. Like "USA Patriot act".
You assume that nothing = 0.
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.