motbob

I shouldn't have called the home energy thing a "deduction." It is a credit. And in 2021, some amount of charitable contributions could be claimed on top of the standard deduction.

"This isn't hard" -- as illustrated by both my and your mistake, this is as far from the truth as could be. Everything related to taxes is absurdly hard, whether it's setting up the right tax prep system, the right level of complexity in the tax law, or simply the right return to file as a taxpayer. My overarching point here is that Congress made a certain value judgment as to one of these very hard problems—that a healthy industry dedicated to getting people's tax returns correct might be in the best interests of both the government and taxpayers—and this might not actually be the product of corruption.

Looking at other countries is unproductive, since their tax laws and tax credit systems are completely different.

For example, in the UK, I believe where a child is living is tracked through some centralized benefits system throughout the year. That hugely changes the calculus as to whether an automated tax return makes sense. If the U.S. had a similar sort of centralized system for tracking dependents or at least children, then an automated return would make a lot more sense, since claiming children/dependents is a huge part of getting the credits you deserve, and it would be great if it were possible to do that automatically. But it isn't.

I've already explained why I think automated returns are bad in the United States. If you disagree, make counterarguments based on how taxes work here, not in some other country with an entirely different system.

"Something like 80%+ of tax payers could have their 1040s automatically generated by the government[.] The proposal was just to have the government send these taxpayers a summary that they can accept or amend, the default being they wouldn't have to do anything at all to file their taxes."

Sure, that sounds good on paper. But here's a list of people who would be hurt by this system unless they were sophisticated enough to realize that they should revise their return:

  - Most people with a kid  
  - Most people supporting a relative  
  - Most people supporting someone who has no income and lives with them  
  - Most people who made charitable contributions in 2021  
  - Many people with a home energy deduction  
  - Most people who participated in post-secondary education  
  - Anyone in the gig economy

That's a big list, and it's far from complete. So it's not clear that your proposed "do people's taxes, leave it up to them whether to acquiesce or not" plan is good for consumers overall.

This pessimism is pretty popular, and it's just wrong. It's not about whether the U.S. government will "displace existing corporations." It's about whether a publicly funded and developed solution to a problem is clearly better than a private solution.

Should the U.S. have an official tax preparation system? That would sure save a lot of people a lot of money, but I'm personally grateful for the fact that a bunch of private companies have been spending a lot of dough trying to develop good online tax prep utilities. Self-service tax prep is in a much better place than it was 15 years ago because of the efforts of those private companies. And an official option for tax prep would undercut those efforts. (At this point, of course, it's high time for the IRS to create an official option, and they are moving towards that.)

Congress is aware of the above concern. The lawmaking "meta" since the Reagan years is to not undercut the normal operations of a competitive market unless there's a clear reason to. But sometimes there are clear reasons to. That's why we have things like FDA rules that tell companies what can or cannot be labeled as "peanut butter" or "milk chocolate." It's why we strictly regulate the radio spectrum. It's why we have healthy anti-trust, anti-cartel, and anti-foreign-bribery laws. Congress understands traditional examples of market failures and is very interested in fixing them. But the tax prep industry, for example, is not an example of a market failure, so Congress is not excited about getting involved.

Getting back to FedNow, creating a standardized payment system to be used throughout the financial industry is a prime example of fixing a market failure: the difficulty of coordination, and the obvious benefit of getting every bank onto the same payment system. So I am not especially pessimistic about the prospects of this system.

Battleships are pretty intimidating too. Still obsolete.

Amazon is buying land piecemeal, lot by lot—probably roughly at market value, then. I don't think it's really comparable to someone buying Sears because they think Sears's land holdings are undervalued.

At worst, they're exposing themselves to the whims of the commercial real estate market as a whole. Not like Sears, where the value of their holdings depended on a pretty niche market—the value of malls.

Yeah, once you get above a basic level of filter complexity, Vapoursynth/Avisynth become much easier to script. The problem is that it's hard to do the initial setup of *synth.

To be clear, there is currently no good alternative to this. The way I see it, the IRS can switch to an invasive "selfie + utility bill" system, or it can remove self-service from their website altogether. It's important to keep tax information secure in order to protect the elderly and disadvantaged. After all, the victims of ID theft in tax are primarily taxpayers who are not regularly filing returns (like elderly and zero-income folks), since two "competing" returns will quickly alert the IRS to a problem.

The legacy IRS identity protection measures are both cumbersome and insecure, so getting rid of the latter problem is a big improvement.

That's a great achievement. It also illustrates why these long bike races are run in stages. A multi-day race where riders can disregard stages will turn into a nightmarish competition of inhuman endurance.

In video game speedrunning, the communities surrounding >24 hour speedruns (e.g. Breath of the Wild 100%) have often set up rules allowing for breaks for runners to sleep. This prevents the speedrun from becoming a competition of who can sleep the least.

Not a good analogy, for two reasons. First, workers who don't have equity in a company don't really have a gun to their head even if the existence of the company is at risk. The real "gun to the head" is the threat of jail time. Second, it has historically been difficult to convince dozens of people to coordinate with each other and do something illegal for little to no personal gain.

If you look at nominal interest rates, yeah. Real interest rates haven't been particularly lower post-1980 than pre-1980. Sure, high interest rates pre-1980 built wealth passively, but periods of high inflation also destroyed wealth passively.

If the problem still exists, it's way less noticeable than it was in 2010.

I agree that removing public dislikes is a pretty bad idea, but it's not that important of a tool in fighting misleading videos. I mean, there was once a HUGE glut of videos with misleading thumbnails/titles, and what stopped the glut was not dislikes, but rather Youtube's use of watch time as an important metric.

True. But I think progress over the years is a better metric for whether things are in a good place, policy-wise, than "some other country does things better." So I'm not grumpy about the state of the U.S.'s internet infrastructure, but I am grumpy about the state of the U.S. health care system (for example).

Well, if you are a simple family where everyone is biologically related and living together, then things are pretty simple in the end. The issues come up with mixed families, divorced parents, etc.

As for the dollar values, if you make $30,000 and have 2 kids, you can usually get a $6,000 tax credit or more. The U.S.'s support for working low-income families is carried out through the tax system. Put another way, tax credits are one of the U.S.'s most important social safety nets.

Maybe it's "bull pucky" to you, but I have vivid memories of my parents agonizing over taxes as a child. The agony they went through is much ameliorated now due to advances in technology.

And thank you for the link, but this news segment basically is big on opinion, low on specifics. Feel free to link me to a detailed article on how non-U.S. countries handle self-employment or dependent tax issues and whether/how those things are easier elsewhere.

I agree with the basic premise that the IRS is nothing to be afraid of if you make a simple mistake. Though if you make a $5,000 error (which is getting out of "simple mistake" territory), they'll tack on a 20% penalty.

That being said, audits are incredibly annoying if you didn't make a mistake, especially if children are involved. The Examinations department of the IRS is hard-headed, to say the least, and they will often make any excuse to deny you credits that you are actually entitled to. In order to get a fair hearing, you have to appeal the case to court. (The U.S. has made the appeal and court processes pretty doable even for taxpayers without an attorney, though.)

The IRS can simplify the process, sure. And if you are living alone, have no children, and don't care about taking advantage of any special credits or deductions, then a "file for me" button would be fine. (Though the process for those taxpayers is already in a good place--I filed my taxes for free in about 30 minutes this year.)

But if you, say, have children, the IRS will not be able to "file for you" in any meaningful sense. Whether you are allowed to claim dependents on tax returns is a complicated question that is highly fact-specific. Happily, the IRS does not have cameras in my house checking to see if my children are living with me. I have to report that information to the IRS myself.

Drive for Uber? Your taxes are also gonna be pretty complicated, and there's no way the IRS can do them for you. After all, they don't have any information on how many miles you drove for Uber and what other business expenses you might have had.

Right now, the system we have is pretty good. Most people qualify for free filing, and free-file tools get better every year. At worst, there is an issue of consumer education (psst, you might be able to find a better/cheaper tax filing option than Turbotax).

Fwiw, there have been instances of Google straight up not being able to restore deleted content. When you go to delete videos, you do get warnings that deletion cannot be undone. I wouldn't be surprised if Google didn't have great records of deleted content.

Maybe Google deleted this tiny channel, or maybe it was user error by Project Censored (the apparent organizers of the conference), or maybe it was a publicity stunt by Project Censored. All three possibilities seem about equally likely.

The most popular subtitling software has a script/plugin to export video, which can then be used in a motion tracking program, the data from which can be fed back into the subtitling program.

No, that's the median cases age.

For chunked encoding and distribution on a massive scale (Netflix/Youtube), AV1 is the clear choice today.

For making encodes for personal use, HEVC/x265 is the clear choice today, and it probably will be for a long time.

If you want to use AV1/libaom and see significant efficiency gains over HEVC/x265, you will have to allocate a lot more encoding time. There's no way around that. You will also not be able to make use of multithreading to a significant degree, for libaom at least (I have not seriously tested other encoders). There are third-party programs in active development that perform chunked AV1 encoding for the purpose of utilizing all your cores.

aom --cpu-used=5 is currently strictly better than x265 --preset veryslow, putting aside the threading issue. Beats it in encoding time and efficiency. But it's an unfair comparison.

The best definition for "super low" that I can come up with is "bitrates at which x264-encoded content becomes hilariously unwatchable."

I will try to be more specific. Youtube uses x264 to encode videos at a certain bitrate. Were you to encode the same video with libaom (AV1) at the same bitrate, the quality difference would probably be noticeable to a casual viewer. If you were to cut the bitrate in half and run the same comparison, the quality difference would be extremely noticeable to a casual viewer.

As someone who has been reading a lot of AV1 benchmarks over the last few months, it's also unclear to me how/why they're doing it. AV1 (and specifically google's libaom) is great, and for VOD-based content it is ready for primetime, but h264 is better for realtime streaming from just about every standpoint.

Though, AV1 is way, way better than h264 when bitrates are super low... I don't know. I wish I had more details about the implementation.

The virus, in some ways, has given them the opposite of leverage. The labor market is and will be flooded with laid off workers.

There's a lot of talk about fiscal responsibility in this thread, and I might have a unique perspective on it, living in a small-to-midsized town and being intimately familiar with a lot of people's finances who live there. I have wanted to write about this for a while, so this is a good excuse.

I serve low-income people as part of my job, and I make $49,000/year gross. But my expenses are about half that. I spend $742 on housing and utilities, including phone and internet (remember: small-to-midsized town!). My food budget is $400, thought I haven't spent that much yet. I have (or had) a $253 car payment. And so, I consume about half of my post-tax income and can save the other half. If I were co-habitating, I'd be able to spend even less on housing. Living alone is a luxury.

So why are all of my clients in miserable living situations? (I frankly don't know how to make ends meet at less than 175% of the federal poverty line without going the rice-and-beans route, so let's set those households aside.) Part of it is due to issues highlighted by this article--why do my clients need a $22,000 sedan when I bought mine for $14,000? Part of it is due to the "cycle of poverty"--once you are poor, you can easily get trapped in poverty until you learn some life lessons the hard way (read up on "flex loans" in the state of Tennessee if you want to see some stuff that my clients have to deal with). Part of it is health care, where costs are unforeseeable, and when they arrive they are quite high, throwing a wrench in the plans/lives of budgeters who aren't extremely careful. And part of it is substance abuse--not the illegal stuff, but the legal stuff: tobacco and alcohol.

In the end, I have gone through a lot of clients' files, and buying a car that's too expensive or living in a place that's too fancy is rarely the primary reason for their troubles. Why am I in such a good financial position where I'd be able to make ends meet even if I made half as much? Well, it's because I live in a cheap area, don't have any substance addictions, am extraordinarily financially educated, have enough savings to buy things like smartphones up front, know how to fight tooth and nail for the cheapest possible option when it comes to big life expenses, and am fit as a fiddle. Oh, and though I am fully on my own now, my parents helped me start my financial life with a good credit score. It's hard for people to check all those boxes, and some are out of their control.

So eliminating paycheck-to-paycheck living is a multi-faceted problem, with solutions as varied as better financial education, moving to single-payer so that unexpected, burdensome health care costs aren't a thing, having robust anti-substance-abuse programs, outlawing 270% APR loans (yes, that's what flex loans are...), etc. There's a strange dichotomy: it's important to have the personal mentality that you are responsible for your own finances, and that the government can't and won't save you. That's how financially successful people think, no matter what their income level. But it's also important to realize that there are ways that the deck is stacked against people.

I remember hearing a lot about it during the leadup to the trial, even as a middle-schooler at the time. Because of how popular the Monopoly promotion was at the time, it left a big impact.

But is ramen cheap at ramen restaurants in Japan?

I ask because I spent $17 on ramen in a large American city earlier this month.

I don't know about that. If a general financial crisis is the concern, stocks outside the S&P 500 would not be spared.

What I got from this interview was just a reminder that it makes sense not to get caught up in enthusiasm for a certain asset. And investors (including me) are certainly enthusiastic about the S&P 500 index fund.

So there are two concerns here. One concern is a problem with a certain asset being inflated, in this case S&P 500 stocks, and the money you might lose if you hold those assets and their value goes down to normal. A second concern is the collateral effects of a bubble bursting: the inflated assets are tied into many other assets/instruments, and untangling the mess caused by a rapid bubble burst may cause a financial crisis. The panic of 2007 (or at least, the liquidity freeze part of it) was not directly caused by devalued assets, but rather the fact that banks relied on those assets having a certain value to do basic, short-term lending, and their confidence in that value was blown away.

The second concern is not really a concern for long-term investors. Really, neither is the first. Maybe equity is inflated, but where else are we going to put our money?

I think that this article is mostly about risk. If you are not too concerned with risk in your investments (which you should not be if you are more than 10 years before retirement, probably), I think this article doesn't say much about what you should do with your money.