I understand your points. This is a labor of love by a guy who's been doing it 15 years.
For 90.35% of tax payers of average intelligence, who've had their return done professionally last year and have a copy, his spreadsheets are fine.
The only time you need a professional is when something new starts like you start renting property or you start buying and selling stocks. In those cases, you might miss a sheet.
Other than the statistical audit, unless you are really cheating hard, there is basically no risk of an audit if you are in the bottom 98% of income. The IRS has better things to do than have someone spend a couple days to nail you for a $47 error in their favor.
Free, works in open office, has been doing this for 15 years. Produced the same results as professional software.
Probably not good if you have some new tax activity in your life until you see it done right once.
I.e. "This year, for the first time, I'm doing my own taxes". I.e. "This year, for the first time, I started buying and selling stocks". I.e. "This year, for the first time, I started renting property to others".
The form is there- but you have to know to fill it out and how to fill it out.
I used it in Openoffice or Libreoffice and it worked great. I have a complicated return and have been doing my own returns for the last 15 years. This sheet made it much easier than doing taxes by hand. It took under 2 hours to do my taxes.
While you can use wireless... you may have to get a TEAC phone to replace your old wireless phone. Same as modern blue ray players.
In my case-- my router is 1' away on the other side of the wall so I just ran a 3' cable to my Roku. Secure. No setup. No risk of interference.
My blueray sitting next to it is still wireless. Lol.
I just recently dumped Direct TV (they'd gotten up to $90) and went for Xfinity Digital Basic. Total cable cost went from 69 to 79-- savings of $80 per month.
No DVR now- but the last 5 episodes of everything is availabe on Xfinity.
Some stations HD, some stations not HD.
But $80 is $960 PER year. I couldn't justify paying $1k a year to watch a half dozen TV shows.
I'm debating Hulu Plus. $8 a month and I get cable TV on my android phone too.
There was a lot of that type of stuff. We fought a guy named Rexal who seemed to do impossible things. Turned out- he was logging on at 3:30am - starting the long printing scripts- hanging up- the 800 lines of text would zip by on 2 seconds instead of feeding to the screen at 2400baud.
Then he would log back on because no one else was up. We had to fight to get in at night and if we got dropped, you might nto get back in and your defenses might be down.
We've found cures for many types of cancer since the 1980's. We've found ways to postpone the outcome for 5 to 10 years as well.
There are several promising lines for cures on some currently currently incurable cancers. One cuts off the blood supply to any cancer. Another activates the immune system to attack any cancer they can get a biopsy of.
I suspect we'll have a cure for most cancers within our lifetime.
We won't have a cure for an unexpected disruption of an extremely complex society and logistics system.
There will probably be an event in our lifetime which will result in the death of a billion people very quickly and with disruption to many societies.
End of the world-- nah. Painful to live thru-- yup.
If it's a major disease, the direct deaths would probably only be about 2 to 5%. Catastrophic to people (everyone would know one or more people who died) but not to the overall population (drop from 9 billion to 8.7 billion would be 300 million dead but essentially leave the population undented).
Insano types with increasingly cheaper ways to kill people are the biggets threat in my mind. Given you could kill a million people for a million dollars- it will happen. That bar is low enough for some crazy millionaire or small organization to fund.
World war is a possibility but seems unlikely. The death rate from disruption of global food delivery would probably exceed that of the war. But essentially leave the overall population untouched.
I think the concentration of wealth and power in 1% of the population is a pretty big threat to the other 99%. Especially since you see repeated evidence that at least half of the top 1% view the other 99% as parasites, losers, not really human, not deserving of food and shelter, etc.
Other than that, it would have to be a massive solar event, quasar or supernova, or an asteroid- which we can't really control.
The biggest downside I see of letting the population grow to the maximum is that we lose more liberties and luxuries and rights and privileges. Nature areas become reserved for the rich since they would just be destroyed if everyone used them anyway. High quality food costs much more than poor quality food. Rock concerts that sit 20,000 crowd out poor people as the tickets get bid up. Etc.
With 9 billion people, the top 1% would be 90 million people. All with 40x your income and wealth to outbid you for everything special or rare.
And because they didn't value females, the generation after that could be another 20% smaller. 88 million young chinese males are facing problems finding a mate.
$5,000 will buy a huge amount of manual activities in some countries. This includes surgury and high quality nursing.
Likewise, liability insurance is much lower since income is so low.
Manufactured goods like beds, sheets, etc. Also cheaper.
Only 1st world manufactured goods and drugs would expensive.
And since they ignore patents and don't pay royalties to help cover the costs of research (by very expensive researchers who are expensive for the same reason above) many drugs will be cheaper too.
----
Healthcare overseas is 10% of the cost. Healthcare in India is 5% of the cost.
---
It's sort of a red queen's race. Things are expensive here because they are expensive. If we were to suddenly devalue our currency 95%, some products like oil would get more expensive but mostly- we would just suddenly be competative with the other countries.
---
I think if you adjust for relative costs of living, you'll find healthcare in the U.S. is really only about 2x as expensive as in most of the world. Still high.
Sad thing is the top 1% can afford to fly to Guam and India and take advantage of the cheap healthcare.
The Navyâ(TM)s surface ships donâ(TM)t yet have the power generation necessary for spooling up a megawatt-class laser â" or at least not if they donâ(TM)t want to potentially be dead in the water.
Reminds me of "Star Wreck".
Of course the weapon in general is Real Genius too.
Find a girl in a bar with an iphone in your target group.
Strike up a conversation and ask how to do some things on the iPhone (like deleting an app you don't want).
---
These days I have an android and an blackberry (because my iphone 3 plunged to it's death). I have an android because the insurance plan for iphones was onerous (essentially "you break it, you bought it plus you give us $100").
But my next work phone will be an iphone... in july. Til then, blackberry with a battery that lasts a week.
I'll pile on and say I havn't pirated a song since 128kb was the standard and allofmp3.com was active in Russia.
I used to listen to XM radio but it got to $14 so I quit. Then they offered it to me for $12, then $10, then $7, and finally $4.75 a month- so I resubscribed. When that term is up, I'll cancel it again if it returns to $14 (which it will). If it went to $10, I'd probably keep it.
I found the local radio stations to be plenty when I didn't have XM. I've never set up Pandora or similar sites.
I haven't put any of my CD's into a CD player for over 3 years. I was given a new harmonica CD as a gift recently as I'm playing with the Harmonica.
No piracy. I don't find new music (outside of Blue October) to be entertaining and I don't find listening to the same song over and over entertaining any more. I can go to a concert, hear the band's songs once that year and I'm done.
For movies, I use Netflix and Amazon Prime (tho less since it is harder to use than Netflix) and perhaps soon the comcast service.
I'm just not willing to pay what entertainers want for their entertainment. Some people are- that's fine. But I *would* be willing to pay $10 a month for on-demand music similar to Netflix. And that would be about $120 a year than I pay now. By pricing their entertainment so high, they lose me as a consumer. And the less I consume, the less interested I am in consuming.
Absolutely. They have to earn money to pay the reporters, electricity, building rent, equipment somehow.
Of course, it's 10 times per month more than I need.
There is a glut of news sources.
We could seriously get by with much less. Due to AP wire services, etc. we basically do anyway. A lot of news is identical in every paper. If the same news is in every paper, why do we need to have 100 different papers?
Why should I care that some random lady in another state 1000 miles away was kidnapped or murdered or robbed? Give me news about my own city and my own state and I might be more interested. There's no need to report international news any more. And certainly no need to pick some random wire service article about a random crime to fill paper around the ads.
There's also an incredible glut of entertainment too. I can't keep up. So I purchase the cheapest stuff (often free).
I think the newspaper business is going to be much smaller in 20 years than it is today.
Instead of giving 700 billion to keep bank and finance types from going bankrupt and losing their jobs ( and creating a huge incentive to enter those fields), let them go belly up.
Then those careers will not attract the smart people.
For bonus points, have pure engineering and science programs to the tune of 100 billion per year.
To keep the same plan limited to 3gb per month I have with them now, they quoted $120 per month with taxes and only 900 minutes per month.
To get the same thing with Spring is going to run me about $90 but with truly unlimited data, unlimited texts, unlimited minutes cell to cell and 450 minutes to land lines.
I'm not mad, but man it seems like I would have to be stupid to stay with AT&T.
Both Cheaper per month and truly unlimited data. Coverage is the same in the areas I live and work in (we have sprint transmitters in my building).
I pretty ruthlessly switch to which ever cell company or cable company has the best deal.
Now that Dish Network is up to $90 a month for almost nothing (I cut service twice and they just raised rates by $10 shortly afterwards), I'll be leaving them too.
Cable TV should be $50 a month max in my opinion. And Cell Service should definately be cheaper than AT&T and include truly unlimited data/etc.
College education went thru the roof when two things happened.
a) The government started giving grant money to everyone, not just veterans b) The government passed laws saying college debt was uniquely unforgivable (despite having only a 1% default rate when the laws were passed- lower than most other credit default rates). This meant banks were willing to loan $40k because they knew they owned your ass forever. And free money mean universities raised tuitions.
Make college debt subject to bankruptcy and limit grant money to a couple grand a year at most and college tuition would drop like a stone.
I prefer to use employees (who know the business) but call in contractors at least annually for auditing for best practices. I also prefer to pull in a contractor when we have something unusual. Why waste 30 days of an employee's time and then fail when a contractor can fix it in 2 weeks and be out the door.
However, my company has tried to replace employees with hordes of contractors (i.e. not high quality experts but just cheap labor) and the result is pretty poor. The quality of the contractors has fallen a lot since 2003-2005. And their turnover is increasing.
For a long time, I worked extra hours to try and make it work but my health finally took a hit and i'm done with that. If the business people aren't going to be putting in 60+ hours and nights right along side me then I'm not. And even if they were, I'm probably done since i have reached financial independence. The bridge to retirement age is finished. Now it just gets better each year I continue to work.
I will probably retire in 4 years regardless. But if I were to leave sooner.. well let's say I only have 80 hours of life per month... retired I'd have at least 320. Every year retired would be like 4 current years and I wouldn't feel exhausted any more.
In fact, if you saved $3,000 each and every month for 20 years and got an annual 4.75% tax free or after tax return, you'd end up with 1,165,520 dollars
This will produce between 30,000 (low risk) and 60,000 (high risk) and 80,000+ (very high risk).
I.e., they earn more in ONE year than you can save in 20 years with a good return in the stock market on a professional salary.
20 years of savings(with good returns) will currently produce about 2% to 6% of what they make each year.
This wasn't true in the 1970's. The difference between the top 1% and the rest of society was much less extreme back then. It started under Reagan (who I voted for) as the top 1% benefited out of proportion from the tax cuts. Their total tax rate has dropped from 28% to 18%. The total tax rate on the middle class is higher (about 28%).
Total tax rate includes both federal income taxes plus fixed federal, state, and local taxes (sales tax, gasoline tax, cell phone tax, property tax, etc.). The fixed taxes comprise over 20% of the bottom quintiles earnings, 15% of the middle quintiles earnings, and under.5% of the top 1%'s earnings.
Companies regard programmers as a generic resource.
They do not think there is any value in knowledge of the business rules.
Off shore contractors turn over faster than onshore employees in my direct experience.
Employees who have been on the job 5 or more years can do the work more effectively, more accurately, more quickly, and manage customer relationships better.
In our experience, HR is terrible at successfully providing candidates. In our experience, Indian contracting companies are much worse at providing candidates than they were back in 2003-2005.
About the time the candidate starts to perform, they leave and a supposedly identical person is brought in to the position. But the inevitable result is several months to half a year of pain until they come up to speed.
Programmers are not generic glorp. Knowledge of the business does matter.
Slashdot Mirror
The older people get, the easier it is to rob them and take advantage of them.
Partly ignorance and partly weakening faculties.
We need to protect people.
And most people do not consider the fact that a saved dollar is tax free while an earned dollar is taxed at 14 to 28%.
I had higher resolution in 2002 than I do today.
1900x1600.
My next monitor will be around 2k x 2k.
I'm done with this 768 and even 1080 resolution
Not enough vertical resolution!
Free.
Works in Excel, Openoffice, Libreoffice.
I understand your points.
This is a labor of love by a guy who's been doing it 15 years.
For 90.35% of tax payers of average intelligence, who've had their return done professionally last year and have a copy, his spreadsheets are fine.
The only time you need a professional is when something new starts like you start renting property or you start buying and selling stocks. In those cases, you might miss a sheet.
Other than the statistical audit, unless you are really cheating hard, there is basically no risk of an audit if you are in the bottom 98% of income. The IRS has better things to do than have someone spend a couple days to nail you for a $47 error in their favor.
http://www.excel1040.com/
Free, works in open office, has been doing this for 15 years.
Produced the same results as professional software.
Probably not good if you have some new tax activity in your life until you see it done right once.
I.e. "This year, for the first time, I'm doing my own taxes".
I.e. "This year, for the first time, I started buying and selling stocks".
I.e. "This year, for the first time, I started renting property to others".
The form is there- but you have to know to fill it out and how to fill it out.
I used it in Openoffice or Libreoffice and it worked great. I have a complicated return and have been doing my own returns for the last 15 years. This sheet made it much easier than doing taxes by hand. It took under 2 hours to do my taxes.
Highly Recommended.
While you can use wireless... you may have to get a TEAC phone to replace your old wireless phone. Same as modern blue ray players.
In my case-- my router is 1' away on the other side of the wall so I just ran a 3' cable to my Roku. Secure. No setup. No risk of interference.
My blueray sitting next to it is still wireless. Lol.
I just recently dumped Direct TV (they'd gotten up to $90) and went for Xfinity Digital Basic. Total cable cost went from 69 to 79-- savings of $80 per month.
No DVR now- but the last 5 episodes of everything is availabe on Xfinity.
Some stations HD, some stations not HD.
But $80 is $960 PER year. I couldn't justify paying $1k a year to watch a half dozen TV shows.
I'm debating Hulu Plus. $8 a month and I get cable TV on my android phone too.
Savings down to a bout $850 per year.
There was a lot of that type of stuff. We fought a guy named Rexal who seemed to do impossible things. Turned out- he was logging on at 3:30am - starting the long printing scripts- hanging up- the 800 lines of text would zip by on 2 seconds instead of feeding to the screen at 2400baud.
Then he would log back on because no one else was up. We had to fight to get in at night and if we got dropped, you might nto get back in and your defenses might be down.
Fun times.
24 lines! chat!
And "trade wars".
We've found cures for many types of cancer since the 1980's. We've found ways to postpone the outcome for 5 to 10 years as well.
There are several promising lines for cures on some currently currently incurable cancers. One cuts off the blood supply to any cancer. Another activates the immune system to attack any cancer they can get a biopsy of.
I suspect we'll have a cure for most cancers within our lifetime.
We won't have a cure for an unexpected disruption of an extremely complex society and logistics system.
There will probably be an event in our lifetime which will result in the death of a billion people very quickly and with disruption to many societies.
End of the world-- nah. Painful to live thru-- yup.
If it's a major disease, the direct deaths would probably only be about 2 to 5%. Catastrophic to people (everyone would know one or more people who died) but not to the overall population (drop from 9 billion to 8.7 billion would be 300 million dead but essentially leave the population undented).
Insano types with increasingly cheaper ways to kill people are the biggets threat in my mind. Given you could kill a million people for a million dollars- it will happen. That bar is low enough for some crazy millionaire or small organization to fund.
World war is a possibility but seems unlikely. The death rate from disruption of global food delivery would probably exceed that of the war. But essentially leave the overall population untouched.
I think the concentration of wealth and power in 1% of the population is a pretty big threat to the other 99%. Especially since you see repeated evidence that at least half of the top 1% view the other 99% as parasites, losers, not really human, not deserving of food and shelter, etc.
Other than that, it would have to be a massive solar event, quasar or supernova, or an asteroid- which we can't really control.
The biggest downside I see of letting the population grow to the maximum is that we lose more liberties and luxuries and rights and privileges. Nature areas become reserved for the rich since they would just be destroyed if everyone used them anyway. High quality food costs much more than poor quality food. Rock concerts that sit 20,000 crowd out poor people as the tickets get bid up. Etc.
With 9 billion people, the top 1% would be 90 million people. All with 40x your income and wealth to outbid you for everything special or rare.
And because they didn't value females, the generation after that could be another 20% smaller. 88 million young chinese males are facing problems finding a mate.
$5,000 will buy a huge amount of manual activities in some countries. This includes surgury and high quality nursing.
Likewise, liability insurance is much lower since income is so low.
Manufactured goods like beds, sheets, etc. Also cheaper.
Only 1st world manufactured goods and drugs would expensive.
And since they ignore patents and don't pay royalties to help cover the costs of research (by very expensive researchers who are expensive for the same reason above) many drugs will be cheaper too.
----
Healthcare overseas is 10% of the cost.
Healthcare in India is 5% of the cost.
---
It's sort of a red queen's race. Things are expensive here because they are expensive. If we were to suddenly devalue our currency 95%, some products like oil would get more expensive but mostly- we would just suddenly be competative with the other countries.
---
I think if you adjust for relative costs of living, you'll find healthcare in the U.S. is really only about 2x as expensive as in most of the world. Still high.
Sad thing is the top 1% can afford to fly to Guam and India and take advantage of the cheap healthcare.
The Navyâ(TM)s surface ships donâ(TM)t yet have the power generation necessary for spooling up a megawatt-class laser â" or at least not if they donâ(TM)t want to potentially be dead in the water.
Reminds me of "Star Wreck".
Of course the weapon in general is Real Genius too.
A tall vertical structure is more subject to damage from extreme winds and flying objects.
Now, if it would automatically collapse flat to the ground when faced with high winds, that might mitigate the issue some.
You are doing it the wrong way...
Find a girl in a bar with an iphone in your target group.
Strike up a conversation and ask how to do some things on the iPhone (like deleting an app you don't want).
---
These days I have an android and an blackberry (because my iphone 3 plunged to it's death). I have an android because the insurance plan for iphones was onerous (essentially "you break it, you bought it plus you give us $100").
But my next work phone will be an iphone... in july. Til then, blackberry with a battery that lasts a week.
I'll pile on and say I havn't pirated a song since 128kb was the standard and allofmp3.com was active in Russia.
I used to listen to XM radio but it got to $14 so I quit. Then they offered it to me for $12, then $10, then $7, and finally $4.75 a month- so I resubscribed. When that term is up, I'll cancel it again if it returns to $14 (which it will). If it went to $10, I'd probably keep it.
I found the local radio stations to be plenty when I didn't have XM. I've never set up Pandora or similar sites.
I haven't put any of my CD's into a CD player for over 3 years. I was given a new harmonica CD as a gift recently as I'm playing with the Harmonica.
No piracy. I don't find new music (outside of Blue October) to be entertaining and I don't find listening to the same song over and over entertaining any more. I can go to a concert, hear the band's songs once that year and I'm done.
For movies, I use Netflix and Amazon Prime (tho less since it is harder to use than Netflix) and perhaps soon the comcast service.
I'm just not willing to pay what entertainers want for their entertainment. Some people are- that's fine. But I *would* be willing to pay $10 a month for on-demand music similar to Netflix. And that would be about $120 a year than I pay now. By pricing their entertainment so high, they lose me as a consumer. And the less I consume, the less interested I am in consuming.
Absolutely. They have to earn money to pay the reporters, electricity, building rent, equipment somehow.
Of course, it's 10 times per month more than I need.
There is a glut of news sources.
We could seriously get by with much less. Due to AP wire services, etc. we basically do anyway. A lot of news is identical in every paper. If the same news is in every paper, why do we need to have 100 different papers?
Why should I care that some random lady in another state 1000 miles away was kidnapped or murdered or robbed? Give me news about my own city and my own state and I might be more interested. There's no need to report international news any more. And certainly no need to pick some random wire service article about a random crime to fill paper around the ads.
There's also an incredible glut of entertainment too. I can't keep up. So I purchase the cheapest stuff (often free).
I think the newspaper business is going to be much smaller in 20 years than it is today.
Which is why the ridiculously low levels to qualify for Felony crimes should also be adjusted for inflation...
Let me explain this one more time.
If the government gives $2,000 grants to everyone, then college will increase in cost by $2,000.
If the government gives $16,000 grants to everyone, then college will increase in cost by $16,000.
The only effect of giving grants to everyone has is to raise the price of college.
Instead of giving 700 billion to keep bank and finance types from going bankrupt and losing their jobs ( and creating a huge incentive to enter those fields), let them go belly up.
Then those careers will not attract the smart people.
For bonus points, have pure engineering and science programs to the tune of 100 billion per year.
I don't "OMGZ HATE AT&T!!!"
But my contract is up at the end of the month.
To keep the same plan limited to 3gb per month I have with them now, they quoted $120 per month with taxes and only 900 minutes per month.
To get the same thing with Spring is going to run me about $90 but with truly unlimited data, unlimited texts, unlimited minutes cell to cell and 450 minutes to land lines.
I'm not mad, but man it seems like I would have to be stupid to stay with AT&T.
Both Cheaper per month and truly unlimited data. Coverage is the same in the areas I live and work in (we have sprint transmitters in my building).
I pretty ruthlessly switch to which ever cell company or cable company has the best deal.
Now that Dish Network is up to $90 a month for almost nothing (I cut service twice and they just raised rates by $10 shortly afterwards), I'll be leaving them too.
Cable TV should be $50 a month max in my opinion.
And Cell Service should definately be cheaper than AT&T and include truly unlimited data/etc.
If you limit the speed of the data, then you limit the amount of data provided per month.
For example, if I limited you to 100 bytes per second, then you are limited to 2531.25KB per month.
So at about 1,000 bytes per second, you are limited to under 3gb per month.
College education went thru the roof when two things happened.
a) The government started giving grant money to everyone, not just veterans
b) The government passed laws saying college debt was uniquely unforgivable (despite having only a 1% default rate when the laws were passed- lower than most other credit default rates). This meant banks were willing to loan $40k because they knew they owned your ass forever. And free money mean universities raised tuitions.
Make college debt subject to bankruptcy and limit grant money to a couple grand a year at most and college tuition would drop like a stone.
I see both sides of this.
Employees ONLY see one environment.
A contractor sees dozens.
I prefer to use employees (who know the business) but call in contractors at least annually for auditing for best practices. I also prefer to pull in a contractor when we have something unusual. Why waste 30 days of an employee's time and then fail when a contractor can fix it in 2 weeks and be out the door.
However, my company has tried to replace employees with hordes of contractors (i.e. not high quality experts but just cheap labor) and the result is pretty poor. The quality of the contractors has fallen a lot since 2003-2005. And their turnover is increasing.
For a long time, I worked extra hours to try and make it work but my health finally took a hit and i'm done with that. If the business people aren't going to be putting in 60+ hours and nights right along side me then I'm not. And even if they were, I'm probably done since i have reached financial independence. The bridge to retirement age is finished. Now it just gets better each year I continue to work.
I will probably retire in 4 years regardless. But if I were to leave sooner.. well let's say I only have 80 hours of life per month... retired I'd have at least 320. Every year retired would be like 4 current years and I wouldn't feel exhausted any more.
Not really...
In fact, if you saved $3,000 each and every month for 20 years and got an annual 4.75% tax free or after tax return, you'd end up with 1,165,520 dollars
This will produce between 30,000 (low risk) and 60,000 (high risk) and 80,000+ (very high risk).
Meanwhile,
http://www.ctj.org/html/gwb0602.htm
top 1% Average income $1,495,000 per year
I.e., they earn more in ONE year than you can save in 20 years with a good return in the stock market on a professional salary.
20 years of savings(with good returns) will currently produce about 2% to 6% of what they make each year.
This wasn't true in the 1970's. The difference between the top 1% and the rest of society was much less extreme back then. It started under Reagan (who I voted for) as the top 1% benefited out of proportion from the tax cuts. Their total tax rate has dropped from 28% to 18%. The total tax rate on the middle class is higher (about 28%).
Total tax rate includes both federal income taxes plus fixed federal, state, and local taxes (sales tax, gasoline tax, cell phone tax, property tax, etc.). The fixed taxes comprise over 20% of the bottom quintiles earnings, 15% of the middle quintiles earnings, and under .5% of the top 1%'s earnings.
Companies regard programmers as a generic resource.
They do not think there is any value in knowledge of the business rules.
Off shore contractors turn over faster than onshore employees in my direct experience.
Employees who have been on the job 5 or more years can do the work more effectively, more accurately, more quickly, and manage customer relationships better.
In our experience, HR is terrible at successfully providing candidates.
In our experience, Indian contracting companies are much worse at providing candidates than they were back in 2003-2005.
About the time the candidate starts to perform, they leave and a supposedly identical person is brought in to the position. But the inevitable result is several months to half a year of pain until they come up to speed.
Programmers are not generic glorp. Knowledge of the business does matter.