motbob

11 ms·

1.
by motbob 4y ago
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 illus
2.
by motbob 4y ago
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 y
3.
by motbob 4y ago
"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 wo
4.
by motbob 4y ago
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 cl
5.
by motbob 4y ago
Battleships are pretty intimidating too. Still obsolete.
6.
by motbob 4y ago
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
7.
by motbob 4y ago
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.
8.
by motbob 5y ago
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 k
9.
by motbob 5y ago
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,
10.
by motbob 5y ago
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 ja
11.
by motbob 5y ago
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 pa
12.
by motbob 5y ago
If the problem still exists, it's way less noticeable than it was in 2010.
13.
by motbob 5y ago
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
14.
by motbob 6y ago
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 inf
15.
by motbob 6y ago
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,
16.
by motbob 6y ago
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
17.
by motbob 6y ago
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
18.
by motbob 6y ago
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
19.
by motbob 6y ago
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
20.
by motbob 6y ago
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.
21.
by motbob 6y ago
No, that's the median cases age.
22.
by motbob 6y ago
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 w
23.
by motbob 6y ago
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 bit
24.
by motbob 6y ago
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
25.
by motbob 6y ago
The virus, in some ways, has given them the opposite of leverage. The labor market is and will be flooded with laid off workers.
26.
by motbob 7y ago
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
27.
by motbob 7y ago
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.
28.
by motbob 7y ago
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.
29.
by motbob 7y ago
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
30.
by motbob 7y ago
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 th

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